Director Richard Linklater with his stars on set.
WHEN IT COMES to contract-killer movies, you’d be forgiven if Richard Linklater wasn’t the first filmmaker to spring to mind. Nor the second, or probably third. Yet the indie auteur’s latest, literally called Hit Man, isn’t your average movie about, well, a hit man. Talking to Empire, Linklater recalls his film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where by coincidence it played alongside several actual hitmen movies, including David Fincher’s The Killer — “One of my favourite films of last year” —and the Liam Neeson-fronted In The Land Of Saints And Sinners. “Those movies are, as far as I can tell, playing it pretty straight,” he observes, laughing. “I’m not.”
To make the distinction, you needn’t look further than Hit Man’s protagonist, a jorts- wearing, bespectacled bird enthusiast called Gary, played by the film’s co-writer and Linklater’s frequent collaborator Glen Powell. He’s based on Gary Johnson, a real-life psychology lecturer who moonlighted as a fake contract killer for his local district attorney’s office. Linklater stumbled across Johnson via an article in 2001, which confirmed his long-standing suspicions that the ‘contract killer’ is a made-up notion. “There were these hitman manuals I remember reading; they were pretty silly,” he recalls. “Like, ‘How To Be A Hitman’. They were part of the underground press.” He later discovered that one such manual was in fact written by a Southern Californian housewife. So when he read the article —penned by his Bernie co-writer Skip Hollandsworth —he became fascinated by the man sitting incognito across the table, going along with the myth to catch out the real bad guys.
During the 20 years that followed, Linklater continued exploring Gary’s world, watching CCTV footage of his interactions and reading transcripts provided by Hollandsworth. “I was just amazed at what little money changed hands,” he recalls. “You know, $2,000. Some teenager had given him $5 and some video-games.” (This example makes its way into the film.) Then during the pandemic, Linklater received a serendipitous call from his Everybody Wants Some!! star Powell, who had discovered Hollandsworth’s article himself. During lockdown they noodled over the story, which preserved some of the original article but evolved into a screwball romantic-comedy in which undercover Gary falls for client Maddy (Adria Arjona), and spends more time as his persona of ‘Ron’ as the pair hit it off.
Glen Powell as Gary — or in this instance, ‘Ron’ — with client Maddy, played by Adria Arjona.