Walter Hill Teases New Low-Budget Film Set in Los Angeles, His First Since ‘Dead for a Dollar'

The great Walter Hill isn't done yet.

Hill is telling Austin's KXAN that he's quietly assembling his next feature: a low-budget movie set to shoot in Los Angeles. In his words, he's "got a kind of a low-budget movie I'm trying to put together."

KXAN's segment framed it as Hill teasing a new film project in Los Angeles, but that's about all we have. No title, no cast, no financier. That alone says something about how Hollywood treats its elders.

It also isn't the first time we've heard Hill talk about what's next. Back in April 2024, he told IndieWire he was preparing to direct a film noir and hoped to make a few more after that. Then in February 2025, a Production Weekly listing put his long-gestating "St. Vincent" back in pre-production, with Samuel L. Jackson, Jim Caviezel and Al Pacino attached. That project has been in the works for roughly two decades and nearly went before cameras in 2010 with Mickey Rourke, Billy Bob Thornton and Pierce Brosnan.

My hunch? A lean, contained noir is exactly the kind of thing Hill can get made on a shoestring.

Low budgets don't scare him anyway. His last film, 2022's "Dead for a Dollar," was reportedly shot for very little money on a very tight schedule. It was a scrappy B-western that world premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

Why does any of this matter? Because, although no longer at the peak of his powers, Hill is one of the most underrated American filmmakers of the last 50 years. He came up alongside Coppola, Scorsese and Spielberg in the New Hollywood era, but his reputation was built in the sidelines, film by film. He wrote "The Getaway" for Peckinpah, then directed "Hard Times," "The Driver," "The Warriors," "The Long Riders," "Southern Comfort," "48 Hrs” and "Streets of Fire.”

By the way, without "The Driver" there's no "Drive." Tarantino, Edgar Wright, Guillermo del Toro, Nicolas Winding Refn and Sean Baker have all cited his influence. Regardless, at 84, Hill is still out here trying to scrape together a movie the old-fashioned way. Somebody should write him a check.