Why 'The Driver' car chases still hold up in the era of 'Fast and Furious'

In just his second feature film, Hill created something that still inspires genre filmmakers to this day. "The Driver" (1978), starring Ryan O'Neal as a nameless getaway driver who becomes the obsession of a detective (Bruce Dern), pushed the car-chase trend of the time ("Bullitt," "The French Connection") and dazzled audiences with incredible stunts and extremely clever tricks.

"It's a different field now," Hill said when asked to compare "The Driver" to newer chase movies, like the "Fast and the Furious" franchise. "I was trying to tell the tale of these chases through the character and through his mental process. We're now in an age where the stunts become a kind of waterfall of events. One topping the other. And technically there are other things that are available now — the use of CGI and various photographers. A very different thing."

Hill also sees another glaring difference between making a car-chase movie in the 1970s and doing so now.

"We went out and shot a movie," he said. "When you look at 'Bullitt' or 'The French Connection' or my movie, they were all done as part of the movie and there was no second unit. We have a story to tell and here it is. Nowadays these big action movies are broken into action units with separate directors. It's a very different kind of filmmaking. It is probably, given what they are trying to do, the most efficient way to approach it, but it diminishes in a sense the old idea of what a director did. The movie was your movie."