The legendaryWalter Hillhas made a career off characters of few words – which is somewhat ironic considering that the loquacious Hill, while also a terrific filmmaker, is among the best Hollywood screenwriters ever.The Getaway,The Warriors&The Driver– all master class examples in the art of screenwriting. Hill has a way of distilling the most labyrinthine of plots and character into their base essentials, turning less into far more.
Case in point: his latest film, the controversialThe Assignment. The film’s filled with double crosses, time jumps, and perspective shifts – yet Hill boils all these complexities down into a simple revenge story: a laconic hitman (Michelle Rodriguez), genitally altered into a woman, seeks revenge against the doctor (Sigourney Weaver) who mutilated him. Have I mentioned controversial yet?
The Assignment, originally a script from all the way back in the late 1970s, still definitely feels of that period – lurid, pulpy, and, well, a little offensive (but with its head in the right place). It’s a film less concerned with transgender theory than with universal identity issues – in particular whether a person can ever truly change, a theme Hill previously explored in the underratedJohnny Handsome.
In the following interview with Hill, he discusses the long writing process onThe Assignment, the controversy surrounding the film and working withSam Peckinpahas a young screenwriter onThe Getaway. For the full interview, read below.
Starting off – I know the [original draft ofThe Assignment] was written in the 1970s. What did that original screenplay [then calledTomboy] look like compared to what’s out right now?
Walter Hill: Well – it’s gone through a few wars. Denis [Hamill]’s original story was a male plastic surgeon married a young, beautiful woman. A teenage delinquent type then rapes the woman and murders her. He’s instantly caught and sent to jail. And when [the teenage delinquent] gets out of jail, serving a rather short sentence because of his youth, the plastic surgeon subjects him to genital alteration. But it mainly was a police story about who’s committing crimes out there in the street. The [delinquent] reverts to criminal behavior even though he’s now in the body of a female. The police are rather flummoxed. They think it’s the old criminal but they can’t find him and everybody identifies the culprit as a woman. That was the essence of the story. And it’s gone through a lot of bumps since then.
What made you change the main character from a rapist to a hitman?
Hill: You work at an instinctive level on a lot of this stuff; but I wasn’t too interested in doing a cop story. I wanted it to be more focused, something very noir, very comic-book’y'… But I think the real answer to your question is that I wanted to end up with a feeling of melancholy – where you felt sympathy to both characters. I thought that was impossible to achieve with the original plotline. It’s important that the story is beyond something that straightforward. So you have doctor who’s lost her license, who’s faced all kinds of problems in her career. She’s also an intellectual of a rather twisted bend – narcissistic, a reader of Nietzsche, very much the ‘ubermensch’. She’s pitted against this guy who’s sort of the Darwinian survivor from the lowest ranks of the underclass, no conscience whatsoever, utterly amoral, who then has his agenda of revenge with the genital alteration that he’s gone through. So you have these two figures bumping against each other and I wanted to get them both into a position where they show some character change and growth without making them saints or anything. She’s reached a point of understanding about herself and she’s going to tend her own garden from now on – no matter how bitter her circumstances. And Frank is now in a different position. He’s resolved to use [his] underworld skills to launch a career of trying to do some good and the implication is that he’ll become a vigilante of some description. So I wanted to get it into a more positive and ambiguous mode. But at the same time it harkens back – I did a movie a number of years ago calledJohnny Handsomewith Mickey Rourke… And there’s a lot ofJohnny Handsomein this thing. Not plot but there’s the notion that character in some sense is irreducible and you are who you are.
So much of the film does seem to be about identity – in particular no matter how much you ‘change’, underneath you’re still the exact same person. Do you feel that identity is set and un-malleable?
Hill: I think that identity can be muted and bent to different directions. But yeah – the answer to the question is: yeah, I do think that. Once again:Johnny Handsome. Which is why I thought so much of the controversy when the film was being made was ridiculous. The movie reinforces transgender theory, which is we are who we are inside our head. We live in a gender fluid world and I think that’s a good thing, challenging the assumptions of the past is good.
Given the controversy surroundingThe Assignment, have you noticed a change in the way people respond to controversy around your films – say when you were making something like48 Hoursvs. now?
Hill: Well… I would say – I don’t want to sound like some old guy who’s complaining that everything was better way back then. Number One: I don’t believe that. Also I don’t think it’s a particularly graceful pose. However I do think the spirit of open debate was a little different and better back then. We live a time of identity politics & political correctness. A lot of time people aren’t aware – they so often think their cause is just and therefore harsh methods can be applied to the debate. I don’t agree with that… The thing aboutThe Assignment– for a movie to be attacked and harshly attacked by people before it was seen, I can’t think of anything more intellectually indefensible. I mean – see the movie. If you see the movie and you say it stinks, that’s fine. No problem. Nobody makes movies everybody loves. That’s part of the deal. It comes with the job. But this idea that we’re being judged on the potential subject matter, the potential that the subject might do something that’s perceived as offensive and therefore it is condemned ahead of time seems to me to be ridiculous. I grew up in the 60s and 70s intellectually and this was just everything we did not believe.
How is the process different re-writing a script vs. approaching something from scratch?
Hill: Well you don’t have the most frightening prospect of the blank page. Before I became a director, as a screenwriter, I wrote both originals and adaptations. When you were adapting something, I always found it difficult because they wanted what they had purchased so that the strictures were fairly narrow and it’s hard to write in boundaries like that. But once I became a director, whether I was writing originals or adapting or whatever, I don’t pay attention to any of it. I just write what appeals to me, what I think and what I can hopefully do well. You serve your own sense of the correct.
This movie has a pretty interesting structure – in that it’s two characters telling the same story from the present. How did you settle on this structural device?
Hill: That was part of my first attack on the movie. It was a tale being told by two people, narrated in a sense by two people in different time frames. Then you become aware of the different time frames at a certain point in the film. What seems to be, I’m not trying to throw myself onto the sides of the gods here, but what in one sense seems to be a fairly simple revenge film actually has a very complicated structure and time frame. Yet hopefully you don’t get lost in the maze as a viewer. The hardest thing as someone said, I can’t remember who, but they said, ‘The hardest thing is to be simple and direct.’ And as usual I think I’ve failed. But at the same time – I think the movie is approachable and doesn’t seem to be a complicated maze.
You adapted the original script into a graphic novel and then adapted graphic novel into this film. Is there a difference between adapting a script to graphic novel and vice versa?
Hill: Those are largely influenced by budget. The graphic novel has the advantage that you can posit two large armies standing in the middle of the desert ready to do combat. When you make a film, you have to pay for the two large armies and going out into the desert. This was a movie that was going to be shot in twenty plus days for a certain amount of money, so there were elements in the graphic novel we had to pull back. The focus was to preserve the spirit…
Is it easier to find financing when you have a pre-existing graphic novel as a template?
Hill: Actually I think there are two answers to that. For this movie – I don’t think it made any difference at all because we made a deal before the graphic novel ever came out. But on the whole, I would say: yes, the graphic novel does help a movie get made because people have a preview of the movie and they can see what they’re going to get for their money.
On set – how much of the movie do you have in your head? Are you shooting for the edit?
Hill: You feel each scene as its own requirement. Sometimes if you feel like you’ve got the right shot, you play it in one. That doesn’t happen too often. But I’ve shot as much as fifteen pages in one shot. Usually you want to show off certain attitudes and emotions, which call for coverage. I’m not one for shot-lists and all that though. I have a rule as a director, that if you ask me for a shot-list - you’re fired.
What do you use instead of a shot-list?
Hill: I just get the actors and we rehearse it. I always say you’re never waiting for me. Once I see the scene and it’s blocked in a way that I think works, figuring out how to shoot it – I’ve never really had a problem with that.
What tends to be your approach working with actors – especially when there’s so little dialogue?
Hill: You just tell them what to do. A normal scene – two people discuss getting a divorce. You bring them in, you sit them down and you rehearse. You give them a start position and then you see what they bring to it. I know what I think. I’d like to now see what the actors bring to it because quite often they’ll bring many things [I] didn’t realize and that [I] like. It’s their turn – so let them show me what they’re going to do with it, what their instincts tell them are right. Then we go from there. A lot of times – you don’t have to say much. I was always struck by how many of the master directors, how often their actors said, ‘Well – they never really talked to us very much.’ Whether it was Ford or Hitchcock or many number of others and yet the performances are really quite wonderful in their films. I think people confuse… I know [Sam] Peckinpah told me ‘Directing is seventy five percent casting’ – which is an exaggeration. He knew it. But there was something in that idea.
What else did you pick up working with Peckinpah? [Hill, early in his career, wrote the screenplay forThe Getaway]
Hill: I remember he said to me once ‘Are you sure you want to get into this shit?’ It was a particularly tough moment he was having on a couple fronts. I certainly admired his films and his commitment to do what it takes to become a director. I think we all learned from Sam. I always had a good relationship with him. By the way – it wasn’t always easy. He was a rather challenging personality and he liked to make everyone a little uncomfortable, not a lot, just a little bit. But I was just a young screenwriter at the time. It wasn’t a dialogue of equals.
