River's Edge

Tim Hunter (June 15, 1947 in Los Angeles, California) is an American television and film director. Since the late 1980s he has mostly worked on television, directing episodes for dozens of televisions series including Breaking Bad, Carnivàle, Chicago Hope, Crossing Jordan, Deadwood, Falcon Crest, Homicide: Life on the Street, House M.D., Law & Order, Lie to Me, Mad Men, Twin Peaks, Glee, Revenge, and American Horror Story. During the early to mid-1980s, Hunter directed feature films, including 1986’s River’s Edge, which won that year’s award for best picture at the Independent Spirit Awards.

Critical reception

Janet Maslin made the following comments about Hunter’s work on the films River’s Edge and Tex:

As he demonstrated in Tex, Mr. Hunter has an extraordinarily clear understanding of teen-age characters, especially those who must find their own paths without much parental supervision. But the S. E. Hinton story for that film is a great deal more innocent than this one, and a lot more easily understood. While Mr. Hunter retains his ear for adolescent dialogue (the screenplay is by Neal Jimenez) and his eye for the aimless, restless behavior of these characters, neither he nor we can easily make the necessary leap to understand their casualness about Samson’s crime. That Mr. Hunter is brave enough to avoid easy moralizing and easy explanations finally makes his film harder to fathom.

Personal life

Hunter was born in Los Angeles, the son of British screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter. He attended Harvard University, graduating in 1968.

In 1993, he refused to cede his late father’s Academy Award for the 1953 screenplay to Roman Holiday[citation needed]: when the Hollywood blacklist was preventing Dalton Trumbo from selling his work, Trumbo arranged for the elder Hunter to be credited instead. Subsequently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave Trumbo’s widow a compensatory award. —Wikipedia