The Driver

1978 film by Walter Hill

The Driver is a 1978 American crime thriller film written and directed by Walter Hill, and starring Ryan O'Neal, Bruce Dern and Isabelle Adjani. The film featured only unnamed characters, and follows a getaway driver for robberies whose exceptional talent has prevented him being caught. The detective promises pardons to a gang if they help catch him in a set up robbery. 20th Century Fox released The Driver on July 28, 1978. The film was a box office disappointment in the United States but performed better overseas. Despite initial negative reviews it has become one of Hill's most popular films, and received more positive critical reception in later years. Directors, Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Winding Refn and Edgar Wright, have cited The Driver as a major influence.

The Driver steals cars for use as getaway vehicles in robberies around Los Angeles. He is known among criminals for his high skill and his high price, and is notorious among the police, particularly for The Detective who is obsessed with capturing The Driver whom he calls "Cowboy". The Driver pulls a job at a casino where his co conspirators are late and he is seen by The Player. The Detective asks her to identify The Driver, but she denies seeing him. The Driver comes to The Player's apartment to pay her. They are interrupted by The Detective, who threatens The Player and alludes to her criminal history. The Detective sets up an illegal sting. He offers three arrested criminals – Glasses, Teeth and their driver, Fingers – a deal: hire The Driver for a bank heist and deliver him to the police; in return, they will go free. They seek The Driver via The Connection, his middleman and fence. The Driver initially refuses to work with the men due to his dislike of guns, but agrees to meet with them. When his driving skill is questioned, he systematically wrecks the criminals' car in a display of his prowess, and tells the gang he will not work with them. Later, Teeth visits The Driver to ask him again to join them, eventually threatening him with a gun. The Driver challenges Teeth to shoot, before beating him down. The Detective taunts The Driver at his rented room and challenges him to a 'game'. Despite being aware it is a set up, The Driver agrees to take part in the job on the conditions that his fee is doubled and Teeth is not involved. During the heist, Glasses kills Fingers and escapes with The Driver. He does not deliver The Driver to The Detective, instead planning to kill him and make off with the money. The Driver surprises him with a gun, kills him, and stashes the money in a locker at Union Station. He has The Connection launder the dirty money and enlists The Player to retrieve it once clean. Meanwhile, Teeth has discovered Glasses dead and interrogates The Connection at gunpoint, killing her once she has revealed The Driver's plans. At the train station, The Exchange Man stashes the clean money in a locker, then boards a train with the dirty money. He is followed on board by The Detective, who kills him in a shootout. Teeth robs The Player of her purse containing the key to the clean money locker. Teeth and his driver, The Kid, are pursued by The Driver and The Player in a car chase culminating in a warehouse, where The Driver drives directly at Teeth's car, causing them to swerve and flip the car. The Driver kills Teeth when he refuses to surrender. The Kid returns the purse and is allowed to leave. The Driver and The Player return to the train station. When The Driver retrieves the bag from the locker, The Detective and several police officers appear, but the bag is empty, the money having been ripped off by the Exchange Man. The Player leaves. The Driver leaves The Detective literally 'holding the bag' as each person departs.

The Driver is the second film Walter Hill wrote and directed after Hard Times (1975), which starred Charles Bronson. Hill and producer Larry Gordon had just finished Hard Times when Gordon suggested to Hill that they make a film about a getaway driver, to which Hill agreed. Hill then wrote an original screenplay over the summer of 1975, in between the period when Hard Times was made and when it was released (there was a delay because the studio was waiting for other Bronson films to come out).

In the late 1970s, Britain's EMI Films came under the stewardship of Michael Deeley and Barry Spikings. They began co financing movies shot in Hollywood in association with major US studios that were aimed at the international market, such as Convoy, The Deer Hunter and The Driver. They were interested in financing The Driver provided a suitable star could be found for the lead. According to Hill, the script was unable to bring in talents for "about a year and a half." McQueen turned down the role because, as Hill stated, he refused to star in another film that revolved substantially around cars. O'Neal complimented the filmmaker as "a force to be reckoned with", as well as "a first rate writer and an even better director. And he's fast. Most young directors today think they are David Lean; they spend over a year on a film and we get robots that talk." Several actors were considered for the female lead, including Julie Christie and Charlotte Rampling. Eventually, it went to Isabelle Adjani, who had gained an international reputation with The Story of Adele H (1975). This was Adjani's first Hollywood role; she had previously turned down the chance to star in The Other Side of Midnight (1977), but agreed to make The Driver because she was an admirer of Hard Times. Of Hill, Adjani commented:
I think he is wonderful, very much in the tradition of Howard Hawks, lean and spare. The story is contemporary but also very stylized, and the roles that Ryan and I play are like Bogart and Bacall. We are both gamblers in our souls and we do not show our emotions or say a lot. For us, talk is cheap. I am really quite a mysterious girl in this film, with no name and no background. And I must say that it is restful not to have a life behind me; this way, I don't have to dig deep to play the part. All I know is that life for me is gambling and I am a loser. I have what people call a poker face. The studio recommended Robert Mitchum for the role of the Detective. Hill liked the idea and met with Mitchum to discuss the part but the actor turned it down. Hill ended up casting Bruce Dern. "I wanted Bruce's personality", he said. "Audiences get nervous about movies that don't have a lot of dialogue. [ ] They like a balance. I wanted Bruce to very much offset the distance of The Driver."

Contemporary reviews were extremely poor. Hill later said, "I remember the studio had this huge sheaf of Xeroxed reviews they’d handed me — you could stop a fucking .45 slug with this stack, it was so thick. And of all the reviews in this six inch thick pile, there was only one good one." Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote "It is Awful Movie. It is Pretentious Movie. It is Silly Movie. It talks just like this." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times gave The Driver 2.5 stars out of 4, writing, "It's a movie about people who are not real because they are symbols, and it's a damned good thing there are great chase scenes or the movie would sink altogether." Hege. of Variety said it may be the first film where the star of the show is a sound effect and called it a "bleak wreck of a film" and that "because of the quiet and mysterious mood of this picture, it has a pretentious quality to it" although noted that the car chases are fabulous. Saying it's "probably advisable for film noir aficionados only", film critic Duncan Shepherd of the San Diego Reader gave it five out of five stars. "The whole show, in fact, is something like a coded message passed from the moviemaker to the devotees of the genre, in full view of, but beyond the full understanding of, the rest of the audience", according to Shepherd. as of 2023, the film holds an approval rating of 79% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 29 reviews. The site's consensus states: "A tough, highly stylized thriller with amazing sound design and car chases."

The film has gone on to become more popular, and it is often the first film shown during retrospectives of Hill's work. The film also influenced Drive (2011), directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. "It's a very different movie", said Hill of this. "It has certain things, as Nic has told me, that are homage and that's fine. It's very complimentary. I bear him no animosity or anything. I think he's a remarkably talented guy and quite like him." Baby Driver (2017), directed by Edgar Wright, was also influenced by The Driver. Wright commented on Hill's film: "Its influence on video games is very clear and in movies its style has echoed throughout the work of Michael Mann, James Cameron, Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Refn and now me with my new film (ahem), Baby Driver."

Around 1996, 20th Century Fox was developing a remake of the film to be directed by Luc Besson, who had already had huge success with films like La Femme Nikita and Leon: The Professional and was working on The Fifth Element. He worked on the script with screenwriter John Pogue, but it was not made.