I became utterly besotted with daytime serials... it enabled me to live in an imaginary world where one is comfortable with abstract ideas, dominated by stories, narrative, and characters.

[7]After this contract to make historical documentaries finished, Hill worked for a time in the mail room at Universal ("Somebody told me that was a good way to meet people"[7]).

"[9] In 1969, he was the second assistant director on Woody Allen's mockumentary film, Take the Money and Run, but said he remembers doing very little except passing out the call sheets and filling out time cards.

[14] Producers Larry Turman and David Foster asked Hill to adapt Ross Macdonald's novel The Drowning Pool for Robert Mulligan to direct as a sequel to a previous Newman film, Harper (1965).

The producers did not like the direction Hill took with his script—he later estimated only two scenes in the final film were his[14]—so he left the project to write Hard Times for Larry Gordon at Columbia Pictures.

It was an intense Deliverance-style thriller about a group of U.S. Army National Guardsmen (including Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe and Fred Ward) on weekend maneuvers in the Louisiana bayou who find themselves fighting for survival in the swamps after offending some local Cajuns.

Nick Nolte became attached as star and Hill's then-girlfriend, a talent agent at ICM, recommended the role of the convict be played by an exciting new comic on Saturday Night Live, Eddie Murphy.

[36] Hill worked on Dick Tracy for several drafts of the script and screenwriter Jack Epps Jr. says he "played a big role in reducing and focusing the screenplay".

[42] Hill followed Brewster's Millions with Crossroads (1986), a music-themed drama from an original script by John Fusco inspired by the life and music of Robert Johnson.

Hill developed this project intended to star a leading man in his mid-30s but by the mid-1980s a number of popular young male actors had emerged, so the script was rewritten to accommodate one of them (Judd Nelson).

[3] In 1987, he returned to hard-edged action with Extreme Prejudice, a contemporary Western for Carolco Pictures about the War on Drugs based on a story by John Milius and Fred Rexer, which had been originally written in the mid-1970s.

Hill said he "tipped my hat to Sam [Peckinpah] a couple of times"[40] in the film and "I don't think it was understood how much genre parodying was involved in that picture.

[39] A project that was filmed was the horror anthology television series Tales from the Crypt (1989–96), on which Hill worked as an executive producer, as well as directing a number of episodes.

These included American Iron (1989/1990), a film set in the world of bikers written by Hill, Mark Brunet, Daniel Pyne, and John Mankiewicz.

[49] In 1992, Hill directed a film originally called Looters about two firemen who cross paths with criminals while searching for stolen loot in an abandoned East St. Louis, Illinois, tenement building.

However, the 1992 Los Angeles riots broke out shortly before the film's release and the studio delayed its opening, eventually changing the title to Trespass.

They developed a film, Sudden Country, an action adventure in the vein of Treasure Island set in late-19th century Texas to star Elijah Wood, based on a novel by Loren Estleman.

Hill and the team who made Tales from the Crypt—Joel Silver, Richard Donner, Robert Zemeckis, and David Giler—tried to repeat their success with another anthology, Perversions of Science (1997).

Afterwards he was planning on directing a 1970s-set cop drama the following year titled Red White Black and Blue, from a script by Andrew Kevin Walker.

At the end of the decade, in 1999 Hill was additionally in development on Persona Non Grata for Seven Arts Pictures, "the story of a big-game hunter tracking down an assassin on a transatlantic freighter.

This caused Hill to withdraw from the project and credit himself with the pseudonym "Thomas Lee" (a variation of Alan Smithee), and chose not to be associated with the finished product.

[64] Hill continued his work with westerns by directing the miniseries Broken Trail, which became the highest-rated film made by a cable network when it premiered on AMC.

Hill also won the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Miniseries or TV Film for his efforts on Broken Trail.

"[65] In 2009 Hill intended to start production on the indie crime drama St. Vincent written by Cameron Young and set to star Mickey Rourke in the lead role[66] with Forest Whitaker, Gong Li and Ray Winstone also cast.

[67] That year, Hill also finished the script for a low budget science fiction project called Unknown, which he intended to make with Sigourney Weaver.

[68] St. Vincent would be postponed to 2010, with Pierce Brosnan, Billy Bob Thornton, Maria Bello and Giovanni Ribisi replacing them, but was cancelled before the start date.

There is a great quote I'll get wrong of Samuel Johnson, the English poet and essayist, that: 'We come to the arena uncalled, to seek our fortune and hazard disgrace.

Written and performed by Hill, the spoken word record tells the story of a deadly shootout that occurred in Newton, Kansas in 1871 and its legendary aftermath of violence and controversy.

[21] "The Cowboy Iliad reaches back to the spoken tradition of storytelling — designed to have no simple resolution, but a mix of history, nostalgia and speculation.

— Walter HillIn August 2021 Hill began shooting the upcoming western Dead for a Dollar starring Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, and Rachel Brosnahan.