Richard Linklater Reveals the Inspirations Behind 'Hit Man' | Vanity Fair

- Hi, I'm Richard Linklater. I directed the movie "Hitman." Co-wrote it, produced it, all that stuff. And today we're gonna be flipping through this book, talking about some visual inspiration. - Sounds lovely. - And whatever else comes our way. [gentle melodic music] The idea of "Hitman" as a movie originates in 2001 with a Skip Hollandsworth article in Texas Monthly. At that point, I've been friends with Skip for a number of years. Skip's brilliant. He's got this incredible nose for a true crime story. And Gary Johnson, in this case, the undercover hitman. He's just letting you kind of have your fantasy. He's your fantasy of what a hitman is, and he lets you play out. He's somehow able to persuade people who are rich and not so rich, successful and not so successful, that he's the real thing. He fools them every time. And by the time you're really sitting down with who you think is a hitman, you're ready to be fooled. You've already, in the movie we say crossed that psychotic Rubicon. You're ready to believe. And I've seen enough of these surveillance tapes and listened to enough audio. I got Skip's entire file. And writing the script, it was fascinating to go through all this material and see how people are almost playing like they're in a movie. - I realized not everyone fantasized about the same hitman. Every sting operation was a performance. This is serious. - I am in service business. - And it says something about, I think, American consumerism that we think we can purchase anything, even someone else's death. Like it's, everything's for sale. But fortunately the good news is it's not. You know, Gary Johnson's one of the most fascinating combinations of impulses and people. He was a Vietnam vet. I think he was in the military police. He must have had some notion of law and order to him. And yet he's a Jungian scholar who likes to teach. You know, he's teaching young people at the college and opening minds and getting 'em to think about all this stuff. It doesn't really intuitively go with law enforcement. So he was a lot of contradictions, I think. We took the end of the article and we just kept going. And it was only when Glen Powell called me over the pandemic and he says, "Hey, you know, I read this article about this hitman." I'm like, "Glen, I read that when you were in junior high. You know, I've been thinking about this for years." And I think we loved Gary so much as a character, as this complex being. I like movies about occupations, jobs. Movies do that really well. And this is the weirdest job you could ever imagine. So it was great to think of that as the bedrock of a movie, but then to actually make a movie that's compelling, that will take you on a ride. What if she invited him to something socially? It's like, oh, then he's trapped in this hitman persona, which he happens to like more. It becomes kind of a body switch comedy about identity and self and can you change? And who are we? It gets very interesting and it kicks us into some... What before was strictly a character piece becomes kind of a film noir. I started to sense the genre I was operating in, kind of a film noir, and when we made the big decision, like, okay, she's not a black widow, we've seen that in all these other movies. What if they're really meant for each other? It's kind of, I thought it was kind of a great love story. So it's like, oh, then it's like a screwball comedy. Once those genres started kind of mashing up, then I thought, oh, we have our movie, we have our plot and our trajectory and we could have a lot of fun within that. Chapter two, crime noir, film noir. One of the great film genres. Film and crime have just always gone hand in hand. We've always been so intrigued with criminals. You know, the "Great Train Robbery," one of the great early American films. It ends with a guy pointing a gun at the camera and shooting and it's train robbery, guns, mythic heroes who wield guns. Almost every movie, I'm just kind of doing a character piece. Then I realize, oh, I'm kind of in this genre. And then once you're in the genre, I just suddenly I start referencing every film I've seen. Then you're in the genre and you're thinking, okay, what are the rules of the genre? What are the typical tropes of the genre? What hasn't been done? You know, so I like kind of playing in that sandbox and in this case film noir, you know, it was kind of like, oh, if you think about it, I'm looking at this gun for a hire. Alan Ladd, even though he is not really even the lead of that movie, he's what everybody remembers. But if you think of films from that era and the classic era is, you know, thirties, forties, fifties, the great noir thrillers of that era, the US film system, you know, was operating under a very strict haze code. The killer had to be punished, it had to be... So you see it in every film. They have to go down in the hail bullets or the, you know, someone's gonna pay. It lives in a very strict moral universe. Like all these years later, we don't have to live in that moral universe. I can really question that. You know, our film really questions that moral universe and certainly I didn't feel any obligation to have some kind of moral authority in some kind of thing. So by the end, our little film noir couple can get away with it and really beg the audience to suspend their moral compass, throw away their moral compass altogether, 'cause by the end, and this is the power of cinema, that my two lead characters are doing, you know, you would say pretty questionable things. But the audience is hopefully pulling for them because you know, put a charming hot couple in a movie, they can get away with murder. And they do here. I mean, I always thought this was a study of passion. You know, he's kind of a passionless guy. He's all brain, no heart and kind of examining that. But certainly by the end of this movie, he is that guy who has jumped into the passion arena, passion and sex. And that makes you very vulnerable in the world. You know, love equates with vulnerability. So it's fun to see him suddenly in that world and making decisions he would never have thought himself capable of. There's a shot of "Body Heat," which is fundamentally an update of "Double Indemnity." The Lawrence Kasdan "Body Heat", which I think is just a stone cold masterpiece in this genre, as is "Double Indemnity." You know, it's the modernization. But you know, it's funny, it's been as many years now since "Body Heat" came out than between "Body Heat" and "Double Indemnity." But something's never change. We wanna see that story. "Double Indemnity" of its time, for sure. We were in that arena. You know, like I said, everybody loves film noir, you know, it's such great characters, great stories, and we've seen them updated and moved around for different eras. And you can get away with a lot in film noir. There's always good characters. Okay, here comes the mashup. We go from film noir to screwball comedy. It was funny. I was at the Venice Film Festival this last year. I got off the plane and people were saying, "Hey, there's four films at the festival this year that are hitman movies. There's four Hitman movies." I was like, "Well, I'm not a Hitman movie. We deconstruct the hitman movie. And I thought it was so funny that we were based on reality, this is a real guy. We have our feet firmly planted in the real world, and we're a comedy, you know, we're just a total comedy. And these other ones that are based on like comic books and something, they're very serious. They're straight, you know, they're like, ooh, this is real. I thought, well, there's something funny there in itself. The real world is funny and the mythological world is like serious. So is that seriousness is just kind of a construct. It's something we impose on that, 'cause we think it would be that way. But I think almost anything can be a comedy, especially the darker it gets, the more ripe it is for something kind of funny. So I always approach this in a dark comedy tone. That was always gonna be the... I like that tone. Maybe I see the whole world in some version of that. You know, kind of darkly comedic terms. I think if there's one genre that's aged the least that you will get modernity and you will feel like you're in that moment in a real way, it's probably screwball comedies, you know? 'Cause they're very sophisticated, the best, and they're less likely to date, I think. I watch a Preston Sturges movie from the forties, and I feel like, oh, that could be made yesterday. That, you know, it feels very current. I'm looking right now at "What's Up Doc", which is kind of the absolute brilliant modernization of the screwball comedy. And Bogdanovich goes all the way with it. He becomes Howard Hawks there for a minute and the actors are talking so quick. Barbara Streisand is just so amazing. And Ryan O'Neill is like, he's just stepped out of "Bringing Up Baby." He's the nerdy guy. So I was definitely playing off that with Glen Powell as this glassed nerdy professor guy. That's just the classic setup for the much more lively woman to come in and seduce or kind of get in and just screw up his life. You know, just take his life right off the rails. You know, often they're about to get married. "Lady Eve," you know, they're always engaged to someone else. You just know that's gonna be a miserable marriage. The audience knows that, oh, she's terrible, he's gonna be miserable. Don't do it. And then here comes, you know, in this case Barbara Streisand, it's like, yeah, she's crazy, but that seems like it'd be a more fun life for him. It's a great tradition. So it was fun to even be anywhere near that kind of tone in a more modern way. The film really has fun here. And then Glen went off the deep end with these identities. But it was true, you know, a lot of these were based on real things in the record. There's this teenage kid trying to have his mom killed who gives video games. There are these society women who are trying to kill their husband. His job as Gary is to play into the myth, the fantasy of who he thinks they want to be a believable hitman. And the real Gary did this. He would kind of change his appearance a little bit. Nothing to the extreme that we do here, but like, we have a lot of fun with it. And like I said, Glen was all in, you know, Glen Powell doesn't do anything half-assed. He read books on like body language and you know what you say with that. He really studied all the accents. Everyone was its own little production. Yeah, they're really fun. They're comedic, but you know, they're based on something real. It takes hours to get everything right. So he would just show up on set, he'd get out of a van or something and we would all be seeing it for the first time complete. I saw sketches and pictures and I knew where we were going. We spent a lot of time creating these characters. But the final final touches were Glen getting out of the van and the whole crew just going, what the fuck? You know, just like, it was crazy. "All Pie is Good Pie." That was a line that the real Gary used. It's in the article prominently. They would just approach him thinking it was him and say, "How's the pie?" And if he said all pie, then okay, instead of throwing around names, that's how they identified themselves. And that was so specific and the clients liked that. 'cause it felt like crime if... Again, it felt like you were in a movie. You know, you're knocking on the special knock, secret handshake, sneaking in the speakeasy, you know, whatever these little secret society codes are. So it felt real to them. Usually you just wake up in a genre, you know, like, oh, I guess I'm in this genre. You know, your impulse has taken you down the road. I think the characters and the story come first and then you realize, oh, I'm kind of in that. But I'm not so sure they didn't do that back then. They probably didn't call themselves screwball in the late thirties. They're like, oh, this is how you make a good comedy. You know, this, you know, Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges and Leo McCarey and you know, Capra. They're thinking that at the time. Like, oh, this is just, I love these characters. I love the banter and I love that. [gentle melodic music] Yeah, thanks for watching. Thanks for hanging out. Hope you like the movie. And always remember all pie is good pie. Except that pie. I would never touch that. Look at that. I don't buy it.