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.