Hit Man is Richard Linklater's version of a modern-day screwball comedy — and a star-making turn for Glen Powell.
"[He is] funny, smart, charismatic, good-looking, intelligent," Linklater tells Digital Spy about the actor and fellow co-writer in this new movie, which arrives on Netflix this week after a limited theatrical release.
Based on a true story, Hit Man follows Gary Johnson, a Houston college professor obsessed with the notion of self who starts collaborating with the police by posing as a hitman. With every potential client, Gary adopts a new personality, adjusting himself to other people's idea of what a killer-for-rent looks like.
However, when he is hired by Maddy Masters (Good Omens' Adria Arjona) to take care of her abusive husband, his priorities change.
Digital Spy sat down with filmmaker Richard Linklater to talk about the real-life inspiration for this movie, collaborating with the Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone But You star and feeling proud of making a sexy, adult and old-school movie in the context of a "prepubescent" Hollywood.
Hit Man is inspired by an article you read in the early 2000s. How has your vision changed in all this time?
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It really evolved. The article I read, I loved that character. What a weird job! This guy is an introverted teacher, but also living in a weird world. The movie never really took off in my brain. I did think about it over the years, I reread the article, I talked to the author. It was just something burned in my mind.
Only when Glen [Powell] called me during the pandemic, we got to talking about it, and we gave ourselves permission to keep going, find new things and elaborate. The end of the article is about a third of the way into the movie. So everything from then on it's just us. Which it felt right with this subject matter, because it's all about artifice and myths anyway. So if there was ever a film I was going to run with, it was this one.
I read that you actually talked to the real Gary Johnson.
Yeah, I got to know him a little bit!
You were even going to invite him on set before he passed away, right?
Yeah, I was having trouble getting a hold of him! But he wasn't getting back to me, and he always did. The film was finally happening, and I wasn't hearing from him. It was horrible, he had this pulmonary issue. He was a Vietnam vet, probably some of this Agent Orange thing, he had a pulmonary shutdown. It's sad.
Did you get to talk to him about how the movie was going to be like?
We had talked about it but not to the degree of: 'Okay, we're making a movie'. It was more about deeper-level questions, that I never got to ask him.
Glen Powell is the man of the moment, but you worked with him way before that. Are you surprised at all that he has become a big Hollywood star?
Not at all, nor is anyone who has worked with him for a long time. Some people have it. Funny, smart, charismatic, good-looking, intelligent — all those things. He's always had this star quality about him, that guy is a star. It's harder now, but Glen is kind of old-school. You know him from his roles that he's chosen and movies that he has been a part of. He didn’t come in as a character in a Marvel universe, he's kind of old-school that way. He's earned it.
And how was working with Glen, not the actor, but the co-writer?
He is a great collaborator, funny and smart. It was very natural for us to collaborate on this, and we had a good time doing it. We really believed in the project and in each other. No one hired us, no one put us together, we did this on our own, no one paid us. It was us really believing in this story and this character.
How was creating every version of the hit man that we see in the movie?
Glen definitely had fun with that, he went off. But you couldn't go too over the top, because it's all make-believe anyway. These guys don't even exist, it's someone's fantasy. Most of my films are very reality-based, you wouldn't do something that outrageous. But this movie is about that, it's about that kind of craziness. It was a fun one. Glen put the extra work with those accents.
Do you have a favourite version of the hitman?
It's a good question, because it says a lot about you, doesn't it? Who's your favourite. Gary and Ron are the story, but, of all the other guys, my favourite is Dean, the orange-haired guy with the freckles. He's the last one. In editing he wasn't the last one, but I put him there, because there's nowhere to go after that (laughs).
He could have his own movie.
Yeah, he's the sequel,
Something we love about Hit Man is how sexy it is, especially in a moment when Hollywood is a bit weary of showing sex on screen. Was this an important element for you?
Yes, and it was important for the story. This is a story about a guy who's not very passionate. He's a thinker not a doer, as he says. To me, that commitment, discovering your passion, love, sex… These are adult themes, and that was important throughout the story to be believable. It's one thing to stay alone in your room, but to go out there in the world and do these things, it makes you vulnerable. You can get yourself in trouble in that world out there. To me, that's very adult.
Hollywood has become less adult, with a prepubescent mindset. That's what they've been able to sell for a long time. I don't know if there is any conspiracy behind that, but that's the reality we've been living in for a while now. I don't know if it's any one person's fault, or just the tenor of the times, but I was happy to make an old-fashioned movie in that regard.
We're sure the 'sexy' was already in the script, but the chemistry between Glen Powell and Adria Arjona surely helped. Did that come instantly when they met? How did you build from there?
It's in both those performers. You can't create it, but you can certainly support it. Those two really got on well, they're such good partners. We worked a lot, we rehearsed a lot, they're both really hard-working. They earned that. Even the sex scenes themselves, that wasn't just me saying do this or that, it was us really talking about what we thought was sexy. Adria brought so much to it, they all did.
It was like: what do we feel comfortable with? What do we do? What's sexy? What would drive you in such a crazy way? That was part of the story.
Another kind of scene, which might be the best of the film, is when Adria Arjona’s character is talking on the phone following Gary/Ron’s instructions through phone notes…
That's a crazy scene, and a classic screwball comedy kind of scene.
Totally! It's such a funny scene to watch, and I kept thinking how difficult it must have been to shoot. Was it tricky?
It wasn't difficult to shoot, we did it pretty quickly, but it was difficult to conceptualise. You spend a lot of time rehearsing that, a lot of time writing it. It was always getting revised. In the earliest days, Gary was driving in his car writing out the script during stopped lights. We put Jasper in the car with him so he had less time.
We were always moving things around to make it more dramatic, more exciting, more real in a way too. That scene took a lot to become something else, you have to work through it. A lot of times, it's too complicated. Sometimes you just have to cut out stuff and make it work in a simpler way. With a lot of storytelling, you think you need all this exposition for everyone to understand everything, but sometimes you don't. Sometimes audiences get it.
Positively and negatively, what are your thoughts on the movie getting a Netflix release only a couple of weeks after opening in limited theatres?
I'm happy that anyone liked the film enough to pick it up and put it out there. Glen and I did this independently. We finished the film and we started showing it in Venice, London and Toronto, so anyone could have bought the film.
But as I said, it's an adult, complex film. I think studios looked at it and say: 'uuuh, that's not the business we're in'. So the question is really for the distributors who could have had it and didn't, or couldn't step up to Netflix's level. It could have had a bigger theatrical, but you can't really second-guess the industry. They're their own thing. That's beyond my pay grade. I’m just reacting to what's coming at us. We're not in charge of that.
Obviously, a big theme in this movie is identity. There's a moment in the film when Gary is teaching at university and he says: "What if the self is a construct and everything in life is role play?". What did you want to say about self and identity with this movie?
I see it in myself over the years, as I've had different opinions of this notion of self. Are we stuck with ourselves? Are we set points? What's the latitude there? Can you become something else? I've seen people change, for the better and the worse. It's one of those eternal questions, but I think it's relevant more so now than ever when you talk about identity.
I like that it's on the table that you can't be [anything]. The world is often: 'Oh, be whoever you want to be!' And then, when you are, they're like: 'No, I didn’t mean that!' To me, it's empowering, optimistic and creative to make those choices. I want everyone to be themselves, whatever that is.
Hit Man is arriving on Netflix on June 7.
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Mireia (she/her) has been working as a movie and TV journalist for over eight years. Based in the UK, she is a former deputy movies editor at Digital Spy, and previously worked for the Spanish magazine Fotogramas. Mireia's work has been published in other outlets such as Esquire and Elle in Spain, and WeLoveCinema and GamesRadar+ in the UK. She is also a published author, having written the essay Biblioteca Studio Ghibli: Nicky, la aprendiz de bruja about Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service.
During her years as a freelance journalist and film critic, Mireia has covered festivals around the world and has interviewed high-profile talents such as Kristen Stewart, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal and many more. She's also taken part in juries such as the FIPRESCI jury at Venice Film Festival and the short film jury at Kingston International Film Festival in London. LinkedIn
