Nobody drives like me. Nobody

Thirty-seven when he starred in The Driver (1978), Ryan O'Neal is no baby. Bruce Dern – pissy, unpredictable – is no cop either. This raises the stakes considerably: you don't know which way Dern's Detective is going to snap and the Driver is a man for whom the threat of a 15-year sentence means something. Isabelle Adjani, beamed from planet France, is as otherworldly as any Marvel heroine, and Los Angeles, filmed mostly at night, is the sci-fi cityscape the space truckers in Alien (1979) might have blasted off from. The connection is writer / director Walter Hill who was leaving fingerprints on Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett's Alien script around this time but The Driver looks backwards, not forwards. It came after Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971) had already put new bursts of speed on screen which Vanishing Point (1971) took to its logical conclusion, and the plot is even older, from Melville's Le Samourai (1967), which was written by Jean-Pierre Melville and Georges Pellegrin and one of those movies you only have to see once to never look at stories the same way again.

The pervading sense of doom is suffused with artificial light, sheer concrete and metal reflections: dark gloss on the mayhem. The opening chase is genuinely harrowing with no comforting score or digital editing to aid the getaway in the tight spots and no wisecracks or memes to cushion things for the viewer – Hill is on an open road. The characters exist only because they act. Driver has no father issues or back story – his goal is to do what he does. Doomed but independent, he's an adult.

Hill's The Driver would go on to influence Tarantino (what hasn't? Although 2007's Death Proof is his most disciplined outing) and Nicolas Refn's Drive (2011) – if not James Sallis' novel Drive (Poisoned Pen Press, 2005) on which Refn's movie is based. Drive is diminished even more after you see The Driver but it was a breath of cold fresh air at the time. And finally, parked neatly (why should he pay?), Baby Driver, whose director Saint Edgar interviews Hill in a self-self-referential handover. Hill plays the old nice guy nowadays and has only good things to say.

They loved it overseas, but in those days, that didn’t matter that much. It made exactly zero dollars in the United States. 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. And now, whenever they show retrospectives of my stuff, it’s usually the first thing they show. Sometimes you just have to wait it out.