As director Walter Hill was writing the screenplay for “Dead For A Dollar,” he looked to the past. But his inspiration was a much older past than the Old West tales of cowboys and cattle drives or lawmen and desperados that have played across movie screens since the dawn of Hollywood.
“I started out with an idea that I wanted to do something – this sounds self-aggrandizing – but I wanted to do something in a classic framework,” says Hill, 80, whose films as a writer, director or producer have included the likes of “The Getaway,” “The Warriors,” “48 Hours” and “Alien: Covenant.”
“So I fell back again — I’ve used it several times — on the kind of Homeric idea of ‘corrupt power figure hires a professional warrior to bring back a wife who seems to have been abducted, but turns out not to be true,’” he says. “I had that in my head, to borrow from Homer.”
