Tim Hunter (born 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,^[1] Falcon Crest, Homicide: Life on the Street, House, Law & Order, Lie to Me, Mad Men, Twin Peaks, Glee, Revenge, Pretty Little Liars and American Horror Story. During the early to mid-1980s, Hunter directed several feature films, including 1986's River's Edge, which won that year's award for Best Picture at the Independent Spirit Awards.

Janet Maslin made the following comments about Hunter's work on the films River's Edge and Tex:^[2]

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.

Hunter was born in Los Angeles, the son of British screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter. He attended Harvard University, graduating in 1968.^[3]

Writer

• Over the Edge (1979)
• Tex (1982)

Director

• Tex (1982)
• Sylvester (1985)
• River's Edge (1986)
• Paint It Black (1989)
• The Saint of Fort Washington (1993)
• The Colony (1996)
• The People Next Door (1996)
• The Maker (1997)
• Rescuers: Stories of Courage: Two Couples (1998) (Segment "Aart and Johtje Vos")
• Rescuers: Stories of Courage: Two Families (1998) (Segment "Malka Csizmadia")
• Mean Streak (1999)
• Anatomy of a Hate Crime (2001)
• Video Voyeur: The Susan Wilson Story (2002)
• The Failures (2003)
• Control (2004)
• The Far Side of Jericho (2006)
• Kings of South Beach (2007)
• Looking Glass (2018)
• Smiley Face Killers (2020)

• Modern Bride (1983)^[4]
• Edward Ford (1980s)^[5]
• RoboCop 2 (1989)^[6]
• Nightwood Bar (1993)^[7]
• Guns and Roses (1993)^[8]
• The Story of Junk (1999)^[9]
• Fade (1999)^[10]
• New Orleans (2006)^[11]
• This is the Water (2018)^[12]

• Tim Hunter at IMDb