Purists might balk at describing Richard Linklater’s newest film as “true crime,” but its roots in the genre run deep. His latest offering, the Glen Powell–starring Hit Man, was inspired by a nearly 23-year-old magazine report about a real-life homicide-for-hire sting operation. “We took the end of the article and we just kept going,” Linklater says.
Hit Man, which is currently in theaters and will arrive on Netflix June 7, marks the second time the 63-year-old director has based a film on the work of legendary journalist and fellow Texan Skip Hollandsworth. The two cowrote Bernie, a 2012 film about mortician turned murderer Bernie Tiede, following Hollandsworth’s 1998 Texas Monthly long read about Tiede’s crime and the small town that came to his defense.
Richard Linklater on set with Adria Arjona as Madison and Glen Powell as Gary Johnson.Brian Rondel/Netflix.
Hollandsworth’s 2001 story about an ersatz assassin named Gary Johnson had also intrigued Linklater, but he struggled with turning the true-crime yarn into a movie. A pandemic-era call from 35-year-old Top Gun: Maverick star Powell changed his perspective. “He says, ‘Hey, you know, I read this article about this hit man,’ and I was like, ‘Glen, I read that when you were in junior high. I’ve been thinking about this for years.’”
In thinking about how to make a “compelling” movie that would “take you on a ride,” Linklater realized he could free himself from the constraints of historical accuracy. The story, about a honeypot of a fake hit man (Powell) who falls in love with a beautiful client (Adria Arjona) he’s ensnared, instead became “kind of a body-switch comedy about identity and self,” Linklater says.
Rather than turning out to be the character piece originally visualized by Linklater, the movie evolved into a screwball-humor-inflected film noir. “Once those genres started kind of mashing up, then I thought, Oh, we have our movie. We have our plot and our trajectory. We could have a lot of fun within that.”
Noir’s distinctive style initially guided Linklater’s hand. “You’re thinking, Okay, what are the rules of the genre? What are the typical tropes of the genre?” A narrative and visual inspiration was Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 film Body Heat (itself a take on Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic, Double Indemnity), which Linklater calls “a stone-cold masterpiece.”
Both Hit Man and Body Heat feature beautiful couples lounging in a tub, and both trade in the previously unthinkable things people will do when overcome with passion. Thirty-seven years elapsed between Double Indemnity and Body Heat; there are nearly 43 years between Body Heat and Hit Man. “Some things never change,” Linklater says. “We want to see that story.”