In the film’s first sixteen minutes, the protagonist does not utter a word—and in the entire script, by Edgar Wright’s estimate, he has around three hundred and fifty. Hill merely shrugged in response: “I don’t know exactly, but very few.” His hero is a getaway driver, credited simply as The Driver; eventually, the cop will tag him “the cowboy you can’t catch.” A silent professional with no name, no backstory, not a single smile—the film was directed by Walter Hill, released in July 1978, and American critics greeted it with such a stack of eviscerating reviews that, in the director’s words, the pile was “six inches thick—you could stop a .45-caliber bullet with that stack.” And now for the other half of the equation: in France, the film drew more than a million viewers; Tarantino put it on his personal list of “the coolest movies of all time”; and without it, there is no Refn’s Drive, no Wright’s Baby Driver, no famous parking garage from the 1999 game Driver, where two generations of gamers broke down. This is the story of how the year’s coolest flop became the genetic code of an entire genre.
The idea was born not in a studio back room, but on the set of a boxing drama. While Hill was editing Hard Times with Charles Bronson, producer Lawrence Gordon tossed him a premise: why not make a movie about a professional getaway driver? “That got the wheels turning,” Hill recalled, with an appropriately awful pun. In the summer of 1975, in the gap between wrapping production and the premiere, he wrote the screenplay in a style he himself called haiku: stage directions compressed against the skeleton of dialogue, not one spare word, whole pages of pure action without a single line—a rarity in Hollywood, where a screenplay is usually bloated with seventy pages of chatter.
The money came from Britain’s EMI, then moving into co-financing Hollywood projects—with one condition: the poster needed a major star. Then the carousel began. The script was written for Steve McQueen—he turned it down: “I don’t want to do any more car stuff.” Bronson was second in line, but he still held a grudge against Hill: the director, in the actor’s view, had cut his wife Jill Ireland’s scenes too harshly in the edit. The studio pushed for Robert Mitchum—Hill went to his office on Sunset Street, where a little refrigerator stood between two couches, and at noon the owner would pull vodka from it. A long conversation, a bottle, then a call the next day: “No.” The lifeline arrived on its own: Ryan O’Neal’s agent called—the star of comedies and Love Story, whom nobody could imagine as a silent pro. He read it, understood the minimalist game, and asked for a meeting. “When you don’t get who you want, sometimes you really get lucky,” Hill said later, calling it the best work of O’Neal’s career.
Isabelle Adjani, who had just set Europe ablaze with The Story of Adèle H., had rejected every Hollywood offer until she read Hill. In a 1977 interview, she explained that he was “in the tradition of Howard Hawks, dry and precise,” while her pairing with O’Neal was “like Bogart and Bacall.” For Adjani, it was a Hollywood debut she would soon regret—but more on that below. Closing out the quartet was Bruce Dern: the talkative detective who, by Edgar Wright’s estimate, gets around eighty percent of all the dialogue. This was not looseness but calculation: “The audience gets nervous in a movie with very few words. I wanted Bruce to balance out the Driver’s distance,” Hill explained. He did not hide the roots of the system: the silent loner, the hunter-cop, the woman behind someone else’s counter—this was Jean-Pierre Melville and his Le Samourai. The visual canon was the nocturnal geometry of Edward Hopper paintings.
The premiere came on July 28, 1978: 20th Century Fox, 642 theaters, two million dollars on its opening weekend. The final U.S. gross—just over four million against the same four-million budget; with marketing factored in, that meant a loss, or more precisely—a sentence. Critics delivered it even more clearly. Vincent Canby in the New York Times produced a parody of bureaucratic prose: “This is a Terrible Movie. This is a Pretentious Movie. This is a Stupid Movie. It talks that way, too.” Variety called the picture “dismal debris” and, at its choicest, perhaps the first film in which “the sound effect is the leading star.” Roger Ebert gave it two and a half stars out of four, in wording that for some reason reads like a compliment: “It is a movie about people who aren’t real because they are symbols—and it’s a good thing there are some excellent chases, or the movie would sink without a trace.”
Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times was hardest of all: “ultraviolent trash that wipes out O’Neal, Dern and Adjani... it looks like a bad imitation of French gangster movies, which were themselves bad imitations of American ones.” Remember that line—it contains the whole ticket to the finale. Producer Gordon later picked the diagnosis apart bone by bone: “With Eastwood, they’d have forgiven us anything—they’d have said, another Eastwood car movie. With McQueen, they’d have compared it to Bullitt. But they mistook us for art-house when we were making action.” Hill assessed the situation without illusions: “If I hadn’t made The Warriors right then, I don’t think my career would have survived it. They loved the movie overseas, but in those days nobody cared much about that. In the United States, it made exactly zero dollars.” The last part is an aggrieved hyperbole, but it gets the feeling exactly right. The lone bright spot in the chorus was Duncan Shepherd’s review in the San Diego Reader, which gave the film five out of five: “The entire film is a coded message from the filmmaker to genre fans, sent right in front of the rest of the audience, who won’t understand it.” And that is exactly what happened: almost nobody understood—and that was the whole design.
While America passed sentence, France gave the film a homecoming: 1,102,183 tickets sold—thirty-third in annual attendance, above many star-driven titles. The explanation is sitting right there in the passenger seat: where the Californian critic saw a “double imitation,” the Parisian saw a direct lineage. The silent professional without a biography, the police officer turning the job into a personal obsession, the woman drawn into the game, the night city as a regular grid—this was Melville’s vocabulary, whose purpose was to strip noir of surplus words. Hill did not parody French noir—he returned it to the Hollywood formula, where the formula was no longer recognized. Hence its fate in Japan, too, where, by Hill’s account, the picture made “reasonable money”: minimalism without stars plays better where audiences are trained to recognize genre rather than faces.
France remained faithful forty-four years later: in November 2022, distributor Les Acacias re-released Driver—first in theaters, in a restored 4K version, with the same O’Neal, Adjani, and Dern on the poster. The fates of the cast, however, diverged sharply: O’Neal named The Driver among the films he regretted, while Adjani lamented that afterward the only Hollywood offers she received were bad ones. By then, the reassessment had reached the land of its forebears as well: the Guardian gave the film five out of five in 2022 (“a tough, cinematically cynical and ruthless drama”), while aggregators settled steadily around eighty percent approval. The reputation curve is a rare zigzag in cinema: from “pretentious debris” to canon without a single re-edit.
The film’s entire machinery rests on two decisions. The first: daytime scenes were shot during the day, while every chase was saved for the night. Before Hill, by his own account, nobody had really done a major night chase—it meant lighting entire Los Angeles streets, keeping to the schedule, and living in a state of chronic sleep deprivation. “It’s like swimming underwater or being hypnotized. You make decisions you can’t explain. You just intuit,” he recalled of the night shoots. The second decision came from his youth: on Bullitt, Hill was second assistant director, and his job was to control background pedestrians and the police cordon—“I was scared to death every time somebody ran into the road in front of the Mustang.” Out of that fear came a professional conclusion: the key to a chase is not the stunts, but the camera inside the car. Hill had noticed even on Bullitt that Peter Yates shot the best footage of that chase from inside the cabin—and on The Driver he made that observation a principle: he had learned there how much time and effort shooting inside cars required, and here he took it to the limit—the camera at the driver’s eye level, inside the cramped cage of the cabin, became his chief way of filming chases.
Not everything worked. The finale of the first chase was filmed on the last night of production—an electrician fell from the roof and was badly injured, and Hill assembled that scene from fragments, calling it “a failure.” But “The Demonstration”—the underground-garage scene in which the nameless hero proves his qualifications to gangsters by threading an orange Mercedes 250 S between concrete pillars—came out exactly as intended. Twenty years later, that scene resold the film to a second audience. Martin Edmondson, founder of Reflections, told PC Gamer that The Driver was the first movie he ever saw—his father went first to make sure it was not too violent for a child. In 1999, his studio released the game Driver, where from the first minute the player had to maneuver a car between parking-garage pillars in sixty seconds: a tutorial harder than the actual driving test—for the simple reason that Edmondson himself could clear it in twenty-five seconds and did not believe humans could be so slow. The publisher, incidentally, mangled the idea: originally, the hero was conceived as a burglar, a “bad guy,” but Sony demanded “someone you’d want to be,” and Tanner became an undercover cop. From there, the line continued without interruption: Stuntman, the fan-favorite Driver: San Francisco—and the creator’s belated admission: “If I pitched Ubisoft the parking test today, they’d say, don’t be stupid. You get softer with age.”
Quentin Tarantino valued the film not just in words, but in the edit: the moment Vincent in Pulp Fiction pulls onto the road with an overdosed Mia in the passenger seat repeats the opening chase from The Driver shot for shot. And the screenplay’s phrase about “the cowboy you can’t catch” returned in the description of Beatrix in Kill Bill 2: “the cowgirl that nobody ever caught.” Tarantino kept a 16mm copy of the film’s television version at home, and it held a place of honor on his list of “the coolest movies of all time.” His honest self-assessment should be memorized by all heirs: “The difference is that Hill plays his tough existentialism straight, and I don’t have the balls to go all the way.” In the eighties, Michael Mann brought Hill the script for the future Heat, offering him the chance to direct—and he refused; Dern, O’Neal, nocturnal geometry, and the “absolute professional with no past” then spent the rest of their lives staring out at us from every Mann movie. Nicolas Winding Refn named his debts directly—to which Hill replied without a trace of animosity: “It’s a very different movie. But some things in it, as Nic has told me, are an homage. That pleases me.” The visual rhyme—the driver in a dark suit against Gosling in a bomber jacket with a scorpion on its back—reads itself, with or without the authors’ approval.
Edgar Wright put it most precisely in his Velvet Underground analogy: “Nobody bought that album. But everybody who bought it started a band. Same thing here: directors watched it—Mann, Tarantino, Refn, now me.” He brought Hill proof that weighed as much as a feature film: “I had to make Baby Driver just to prove to you how important The Driver was.” The credits of that picture, incidentally, include a voice cameo by Hill himself. And Wright’s marathon campaign to rehabilitate the film ended with a simple line from the gray-haired director, spoken at the Bonaventure Hotel—the film’s key location, which Hill had not returned to in almost forty years: “That someone remembers something you did thirty-five years ago and still sees value in it? That makes an old man happy.”
The answer to the original paradox is dry, and for that reason instructive: action movies are usually sold on faces, while Hill removed the faces from the machine and left only functions. The American audience of 1978, having bought a ticket for O’Neal after Love Story, honestly did not understand whom they were supposed to root for when the hero was given no name, no biography, no smile. A flop does not mean the film was bad—it means the film arrived too early: a genre parable in an era when genre was measured in stars and explosions. And the formula itself—“a bad imitation of French movies that were themselves imitating American ones”—turned out to be a coil of dominoes: American noir was once stripped down to haiku by the French; Hill returned that haiku to America without the gloss—America called it a fake, then spent forty years imitating him instead, from Mann to the garage parking lot where you may well have burned out yourself in sixty seconds. The Driver did not flop. It simply got ahead of its audience by a generation—and the audience arrived when it grew up.
Sources: Wikipedia — The Driver (1978); Empire — Edgar Wright & Walter Hill in conversation, February 2017; Cinephilia & Beyond — Sven Mikulec, 2023; TCM — Sean Axmaker, 2016; Dazed — "Baby Driver and Drive owe everything to this car chase film", 2017; Boxoffice Pro — Driver de Walter Hill ressort chez Les Acacias, September 2022; PC Gamer — Jeremy Peel, July 2021.