On January 29, 2013, AM New York posted a short interview with Walter Hill. Here’s some of what he had to say about Sly…
Sly and I, we have known each other a long time. I met Sly the first time before “Hard Times” came out [in 1975] and before he had done “Rocky.” He and I had and still have the same lawyer. We were introduced way back then. I’d sent him scripts a couple times to try and tease him out and get him to do something. He’d done the same with me, and it just never quite [worked out] – whether it was time and circumstance, or whatever. But I’ve always admired him.
I came out of the experience of those films really on a positive basis with all these guys. At least when I run into them, they’re very nice to me, so it seems OK. The first premise is they have a great gusto for the genre … Bruce and Sly are much more alike than Arnold is. Arnold’s hard to define. I always thought whatever you said about him, there were always these other things that were true … Bruce and Sly are both trained actors. They’ve gone through the process, they learned, they studied, they went out, they tried, they were rejected, they failed, they succeeded marginally and then they succeeded and then they became gigantic successes. Whereas Arnold was a world figure before he ever did a movie.