Walter Hill hasn't stopped making films yet.

Even though he's 73 now, he's currently prepping to make another. A little indie movie called Tom Boy. "I don't seem to be able to give up the habit," he laughs down the line from his home in Los Angeles.

It's a habit he's been cultivating for decades. He started back in the 1970s making movies with Charles Bronson. In the 1980s he helped make a star of Eddie Murphy with 48 Hours. And in the 21st century he was one of the first movie directors to move into long-form TV, shooting the pilot of the HBO western Deadwood.

Westerns, thrillers, war movies, gang movies. He's made them all. Films about men. It's usually men. And usually violent men. The early ones - from Hard Times (the Bronson one; the story of a bare-knuckle fighter in the hard-scrabble Depression era) in 1975 to rock 'n' roll fantasy Streets Of Fire in 1984 (notable for early appearances by Diane Lane and Willem Dafoe and, perhaps more problematically, for songs by Jim Steinman) - are about to be the subject of an Edinburgh International Film Festival retrospective.

The foot-Hills you might say (if you wanted to make a terrible pun). "Yes, before my melancholy period as somebody said," he chuckles when I bring the retrospective up. "My movies all get very sad after about 1985, I think it was. Or so they told me. I always say every good story ends with a tear. Even the comedies."

Hill speaks in a slow, easy growl, a contented Papa Bear of a voice that seems removed from the content of his movies but maybe speaks to their unshowy yet potent style. For someone whose films are so good at catching the eye, Hill has never been one to say 'Look at me'. In life or on the movies.

"I think ideally the storyteller doesn't make a big show of himself or herself," he agrees. "I always want the audience to feel that they are in the grip of the storytelling hopefully without calling undue attention to yourself because I think that's usually a fault."

Not that there is anything anonymous about the result. Before we talk I've been reacquainting myself with Hill's early showreel; from the jittery chase sequences in his 1978 movie The Driver - all neon bleed, dopplering sirens and crumpling metal - a film that provided a blueprint for Nicolas Winding Refn's 2011 thriller Drive, to the masterclass in editing that is the final sequence in Hill's 1981 war movie Southern Comfort, which is, if you twist my arm up my back, the Hill film I'd choose as the one for the ages.

The story of a group of National Guards who get lost in the bayou and bring doom down on their heads by shooting at passing Cajuns, Hill has always been keen to stress that Southern Comfort was not meant as a Vietnam allegory. When he was having a read-through with the cast, he remembers, "the first thing I said was 'a lot of people are going to say that this movie is metaphoric of Vietnam. We're not making a metaphor. We're trying to create some real characters here and a real situation. And that's what I want you to know and that's what I want you to play."

And yet these early films were made against the backdrop of Vietnam and civil unrest in America and black power and gang violence (the release of Hill's 1979 film The Warriors was marked by a couple of incidents in US cinemas). It's difficult to believe the violence on screen didn't seep in from the outside. Violence is often the subject.

A few years back Walter Hill wrote an article about his fellow director Robert Aldrich. In it he suggested that Aldrich - who in Kiss Me Deadly at the very least gave us one stone cold masterpiece - saw violence as "a natural result of the human condition". Is that how Hill sees things himself?

"Well, I'm sure they're selling newspapers there in Scotland. One just has to go to page one usually. I think it's common human behaviour. That's undeniable."

In his defence, the violence in his films is rarely cartoonish. Characters don't jump up after being shot 50 times. "I think I have been guilty of that a few times in a couple of movies," he concedes. "But I appreciate what you said and I have certainly tried for that in most films. When you commit an act of violence there are consequences."

Anyway, he says, audiences are much more sophisticated in reading screen violence than some critics. "The South Korean and Japanese make much more violent movies and they have very peaceable societies. The crime rates in both those countries are very minimal by American standards."

There doesn't seem to have been much ferocity on Hill's sets either, it seems. What it was like having to direct a notoriously difficult star like Charles Bronson on your first film, I ask at one point? "Charlie was known to be kind of a tough guy to work with, but I got along well with him. We never became friendly or anything. I was curious why he was giving me a dispensation from his usual kind of tough behaviour. I would like to tell you it was because I was such a formidable force myself, but I think it was that he was not used to working with directors who had written the scripts. And he liked the script a lot. I think he really cut me a lot of slack.

"And he did enjoy playing the character. He didn't have to define himself with a lot of dialogue. Charlie kind of understood his own poetry very well. And he knew that he could do a lot through mood and movement and stares. It's much my favourite kind of movie acting, whether it's Alain Delon or Bronson or any number of people. Mark Rylance. Occasionally you come across actors that can really help you tell the story with a kind of minimalism. They're worth their weight in gold. There's not a lot of them."

In some ways 48 Hours was Hill's commercial and critical high point. Streets Of Fire was met with indifference and, after, that he entered his "melancholy years", which didn't stop him working with stars such as Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Richard Pryor. In the 1990s made two very highly regarded westerns, Wild Bill and Geronimo which, though no great shakes commercially, couldn't have hurt when HBO were looking for a director for Deadwood.

He didn't make any stylistic accommodations for the new medium. "Visually I just shot the way I shoot. Look, every time you make a movie you know that three-fourths of the people who will ever see this film will probably see it on a television screen. It's a dilemma. Are you going to shoot something that is ideal for the most pristine screen in New York or Los Angeles or London or Paris, or are you going to shoot something that you know will be seen on a much smaller-sized viewing apparatus? To tell you the truth, I pay no attention to it. I shoot what I think is the best way to tell the story. I hope it looks the best on the big screen and I hope it looks fine on the little screen. I just try to tell the story."

Actually, he says, it's the story that he has problems with when it comes to TV work. "We're living in a moment that is idealising long-form television over here, but I'm not crazy about it. It has its advantages but, you know, to me part of what I do is being a storyteller and a story has a conclusion.

"When you do the pilot to Deadwood or something, what they want you to do is tell a story so you get somebody to watch next week and not bring the story to a conclusion. Well, that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. In the list of sins, it's pretty minor. But I don't think it's the complete answer to being a story teller. I think the unities still apply. This idea, 'Don't worry, they'll figure out how to end the thing two years from now if they're lucky', kind of begs the question."

That sounds like a good place to finish, the point at which we realise that we don't know how to bring things to a close any more.

Walter Hill is still making films. This is not where the story ends.

Walter Hill: The Early Years is part of this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival, which runs from June 17-28. For more details visit edfilmfest.org.uk