Jack Hill

Birthday: 28 January 1933, Los Angeles, California, USA

Jack Hill grew up around movies--his father was a designer for the Disney studios and Warner Brothers. He went to the University of California to study film, where he was a classmate of Francis Ford Coppola--they worked together on student productions and later both apprenticed with Roger Corman, working on The Terror (1963). While Coppola went on to Oscardom, Jack continued with B-flicks. He didn't make a lot of films, and while all were low-budget they all (except The Jezebels (1975)) made money, and his early "blaxploitaton" films Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) were hits. Soon after "The Jezebels" he stopped making movies so he and his wife Elke could pursue meditation and he could write novels. Nowadays his films are hailed as cult classics, thanks primarily to Quentin Tarantino, who saw Hill's work as it made its way to video. With retrospectives and a re-release of "The Jezebels", his career seems to be reviving. Show less «

I always wanted people to feel positive at the end of my films. I was always careful to try and juxt...Show more »

I always wanted people to feel positive at the end of my films. I was always careful to try and juxtapose humor with the violence and tragedy. I think I accomplished that, and perhaps that is why a generation or two later my films are still popular and in-demand while many of the mainstream movies I was up against at the time, and truth be known, I was quite envious of, are now forgotten. Show less «

[on making 1970s "blaxplotation" films] You were working on pictures that the industry had nothing b...Show more »

[on making 1970s "blaxplotation" films] You were working on pictures that the industry had nothing but contempt for. There was a lot of racism in the industry, a lot of it was under the surface, but it was here. And the executives at the studios really had contempt for the audience they were making movies for. It was an uphill struggle to try to do anything really good. Show less «

I had the freedom to improvise. I feel quite fortunate that I worked in the low-budget sector becaus...Show more »

I had the freedom to improvise. I feel quite fortunate that I worked in the low-budget sector because it meant I did not have to deal with committees who wanted to impose their ideas and prejudices on my material. I had a free hand--much more so than I would have had if I was working for the studios. As long as you put the elements in there that producers like Corman [Roger Corman] knew they could sell, such as sex and violence, you could raise the picture a little higher than expected and give the audience something intelligent to chew on. Show less «

Jack Hill

Jack Hill's FILMOGRAPHY

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