In Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man,” truth proves stranger than fiction. Based on Skip Hollandsworth’s Texas Monthly piece of the same name from 2001, Linklater’s newest film follows Glen Powell as Gary Johnson, a man so good at pretending to be someone else he could convince clients he was a cold-blooded contract killer. In real life, after Johnson confirmed with a client he’d been hired to murder someone, recording the conversation for evidence, the police would arrest the person afterward. Johnson was so good at his bit that Texas police “considered [him] to be one of the greatest actors of his generation, so talented that he can perform on any stage and with any kind of script,” Hollandsworth writes in “Hit Man.” If that’s not the premise for a great movie, what is?
In Vanity Fair‘s new sneak-peek at Linklater’s film, “Hit Man” proved much harder to make into a movie than the director anticipated. It’s Linklater’s second adaptation of a piece of Hollandsworth’s, the other being the 2011 dark comedy “Bernie,” also based on real events. “I love this character, but I wasn’t sure of the movie,” Linklater told VF. “We’ve got a great character, great incidents, great moments, all these great characters, but I didn’t know if it really went anywhere.” The problem was with his script’s third act. “I’d had meetings on it over the years and stuff, but it just never really went anywhere,” Linklater continued. “It just didn’t cohere as a story.”
Enter Mr. Powell, who called up Linklater during the COVID-19 pandemic and asked him if he’d ever read the “Hit Man” piece in Texas Monthly. After some brainstorming, the pair hatched up a perfect pivot: the film’s third act would veer in a new direction based on a small incident Hollandsworth’s article only grazes. And so “Hit Man” the film was born: a movie that operates as a noir, a comedy, and a romance, and just as colorful as the long-form journalism piece it’s based on. And Linklater ultimately sees the movie as one about identity, in all its pliability. “It seemed to be all about identity,” Linklater mused, and Powell’s Gary oscillates throughout the film between his real persona and “Ron,” a charismatic alter-ego. “How much can we change?” Linklater continued. “Can you change? Are we fixed as people?” “Hit Man” explores that notion in the most colorful way possible.
In the New Orleans-set film, Powell’s Gary goes undercover as Ron to meet Adria Arjona’s potential client, a woman who wants her controlling husband popped. But instead of taking up her offer, Gary instead advises the woman to try and leave her husband instead, causing the two’s lives to become increasingly more intimate. Just what ruse is Gary/Ron playing here? To prepare for the complicated role, Powell and Linklater listened to audio of Johnson’s sting operations, but the actor also knew he needed to make his character’s various personas stand apart. “Glen, the thorough professional he is, was reading books on body language, and he thought Ron would walk a little different than Gary, and he also had a lot of fun with the accents,” Linklater explained. “Every movie needs something that’s kind of difficult to pull off or something that seems especially challenging.” In the case of “Hit Man,” that’s Powell playing both a mild-mannered teacher and the calculating murderer he pretends to be.
But to make “Hit Man” work, Linklater needed to sacrifice some of the real story’s juicier bits. “We could have done a lot more of those,” the director said about the various clients Johnson had in real-life. “There’s an alternate movie that’s just all these people at that moment. These rich society ladies, with their nice dresses, sitting down in a nice hotel room talking about how to kill their rich husband they’re sick of.” Linklater finds that sudden shift in Johnson’s recordings of regular people socializing to “so matter of factly” contracting someone for murder the most fascinating detail of “Hit Man.” “It’s almost like they’re all acting in their own little crime movie when someone’s suddenly working with a mobster,” he continued. “I thought it was all so dark and funny in the strangest way.”
As for the real-life Gary Johnson, he’s since passed away, but Linklater was able to talk with him over the phone while he penned the script. The director called Johnson “the chillest dude imaginable,” and “he was just the most nonplussed guy. We would talk about baseball or something, but he was a man of few words, actually.” And Linklater discovered any uncanny element to the story: despite moonlighting as an undercover hit man, Johnson was well-known in his area of Texas, regularly attending court proceedings and featured in various news outlets. “It was like two different worlds,” Linklater joked. “People that are doing the hits aren’t reading the paper.”
“Hit Man” has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 4, followed by another screening at TIFF on September 11. The film also screens at the New York Film Festival. Stay tuned for details on the film’s theatrical release.
