The striking thing about The Warriors is simultaneously its classicism and its modernity. A classicism and modernity that are beyond any temporal category, because Hill’s film is above all ‘outside time’. So the adjectives ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ are not synonymous with ‘ancient’ and ‘new’. Not at all. The classical structure of The Warriors derives above all from its literary origins, the novel of the same name by Sol Yurick, published in 1965. The writer was inspired by a text by Xenophon, Anabasis, which he had updated, transporting to the streets of New York the original events (10,000 mercenary soldiers, far from their homeland and without a leader, who encounter strange and hostile people while trying to make their way home). And that is not all. Hill respects, above all in his writing, the three unities of Greek tragedy: place, time and action. The place is carefully circumscribed by the urban barriers of New York. The big wheel of the amusement park that opens the film and reappears, at dawn, in one of the final scenes is the object-sign of a place of departure/return, of narrative circularity. It is the real nucleus from which all the arteries that lead to different parts of the metropolis seem to start. It is a New York also stripped of its distinctive architectural features, assimilated by Laszlo’s nocturnal photography – which further accentuates the chiaroscuro of the outlines of objects and bodies (the physiques and facial expressions of the Warriors themselves appear sculpted) – into an anonymous city/myth of the past… Horror, western, musical, youth gang film, urban thriller. The Warriors is a genuinely explosive mix of pure cinema. It is a classical work also on a formal level… the film always remains both “within tradition” and “outside tradition”. Perhaps this explains not only its modernity but above all the reason why it undoubtedly anticipated and influenced later films, as well as, implicitly or explicitly, the language of many filmmakers to come.

Simone Emiliani, Mauro Gervasini, Walter Hill, Falsopiano, Alessandria, 2001

I think the idea of viewing a gang not as a social problem but rather from a different point of view, in terms of their heroism, in the classical sense of the term, is rather interesting… I liked the idea of telling a story based on Greek history. Specifically, Anabasis relocated to a futuristic, sci-fi setting… When you create science fiction there is often the temptation to render it completely abstract. I thought that the challenge would be to make it simultaneously realist and fantastic; I wanted to combine these two elements in order to turn it into a dark comic book.

Walter Hill, in Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, Walter Hill, Museo Nazionale del Cinema – Fondazione Maria Adriana Prolo, Torino 2005