Walter Hill On Southern Comfort, Nick Nolte

Southern Comfort, and in fact, all of his movies from that time, are some of the best movies from the 1980s.  And recently at the Lumière Festival, director Walter Hill has been speaking about some of his movies.

On Southern Comfort, Hill said the movie is “usually perceived to be a metaphor for Vietnam.”. He has always denied this, and still did at Lyon. That said, he admitted to it being “certainly one of my favorite films” of those he has made.

Hill also spoke of working with Nick Nolte in 48 Hrs.

“He’s a big lug of a guy and very lovable and very passionate about his work, and he was so good in the movie and he helped Eddie so much,” Hill said of Nolte. “Every day I would drive in, and the first thing I would hear is: ‘Nick needs to see you.’ I would say, ‘OK, send him over.’ They would say: ‘He’s in makeup. Can you go over there?’ I would say: ‘Well, when he’s done, send him over here.’”

So Nolte would come over. “‘Goddammit, I read this scene,’ Nolte would say,” Hill recalled. “‘This scene doesn’t work at all.’ ‘Of course, it works, I wrote it, what are you talking about?’ ‘I was talking to Ed about it and Ed agrees with me.’ And you know he’s the only guy in the world that calls Eddie Murphy ‘Ed.’ ‘Ed agrees with me it doesn’t work, but he’s afraid of you so he won’t come over.’ I would say: ‘We better rehearse.’ Nick: ‘There is no point in rehearsing because Ed can’t say the dialogue.’ I would ask him to show me the lines he can’t say and we would reverse the line and cut it or something and it would be fine. It would be like that every day but it was fine.”