Writer, director and producer Taylor Hackford's first fictional image portrayed a seventeen-year-old American boy being followed around Los Angeles by a camera. The teenager, both natural and touching, is awaiting the birth of his child with his girlfriend, who is fifteen. Teenage Father (1978), winner of the Oscar for best short film, was treated like a news report. This comes as no surprise, as Hackford comes from a documentary background. In the 1960s, he went to Bolivia with the Volunteers for Peace, a kind of NGO working with developing countries. There, using his Super 8, he shot what he saw, including young people in difficulty. Perhaps it was for this reason that he filmed the Chicanos of the poor neighbourhoods of Los Angeles with an affectionate ease, for Bound by Honor/Blood In Blood Out (1993).

Hackford began his career working for KCET, L.A.'s public service television station, where he made documentaries. Retaining a taste for the genre, he produced Richard Davies' Bukowski (1973) and Leon Gast's fabulous When We Were Kings (1996). From his observations of the world, Hackford developed a fictional cinema with widespread appeal and a narrative lyricism.

The world remembers the brilliant ending between the young working-class woman and the military hero of proletarian origins in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), the movie that introduced him to the general public. This was followed by White Nights (1985), again about the fate of a young man in the geopolitical context of the Soviet Cold War, and The Devil's Advocate (1997), in which the main character, played by Keanu Reeves, must escape the unbridled capitalism imposed by a delirious devil, incarnated by Al Pacino. Another element these works have in common is gripping suspense, as in the sensual thriller Against All Odds (1984). 

« So, I went to meet Taylor Hackford already slightly mad, and refusing to look like a star of the Kirov Ballet. He's late and I wait angrily in the office, glancing at the girl next to me. I feel insulted. If I can make it on time, so can he. Fifteen minutes go by. I say to myself, ‘Okay, I'll wait twenty minutes, tops. But that's it.’ Another five minutes go by and I get up to go, telling the panicked secretary that I'm leaving. I head for the door and, just as I reach for the handle, Taylor walks into the room - and into the next few years of my life too, and it’s not over yet. »

The grande dame of  English cinema, Helen Mirren, on Taylor Hackford, the man she now shares her life with, on the casting of White Nights.