Richard Linklater Explains How He Turned True Crime Into Screwball Comedy

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.”

There were also elements of the genre Linklater was eager to upend. During noir’s peak from the 1930s to the 1950s, narratives were often dictated by the Hays Code, a morality-based set of onscreen content rules that laid the groundwork for the film-rating system of today. Every sin had its penalty, and no crime could go unpunished.

But “all these years later, we don’t have to live in that moral universe,” Linklater says. “I didn’t feel any obligation to have some kind of moral authority.” That meant he could have his noir cake and eat it too.

“Put a charming, hot couple in a movie, and they can get away with murder,” Linklater says. “And they do here.”

Linklater is adamant that unlike other recent murder-for-money movies (Harmony Korine’s assassination acid trip, Aggro Dr1ft, and David Fincher’s philosophical The Killer among them), his is a comedy. “The real world is funny, and the mythological world” of those other films “is, like, serious. So that seriousness is just kind of a construct. It’s something we impose on that because we think it would be that way.”

According to Linklater, screwball comedies by directors such as Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks ring truer than those slick and cold films. Pulling from stiff and bespectacled dreamboats like Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby and Ryan O’Neal in What’s Up, Doc?, Powell’s Johnson initially reads as a repressed nerd. And like the characters of those comedy icons, Johnson has his airless existence upended—and vastly improved—by a kooky dame who ruffles his hair and “just screw[s] up his life.”

“It’s a great tradition,” Linklater says. “It was fun to even be anywhere near that kind of tone in a more modern way.”

Though the film is largely fantasy, from the bubbly romance to the multitude of people Johnson pretends to be—yes, there are funky wigs and wacky glasses galore—an oft-repeated line from the movie is ripped straight from the true-crime story that inspired it.

During the real Johnson’s sting operation, his purported clients were told to approach him at a restaurant and ask, “How’s the pie?” Johnson would reply, “All pie is good pie.”

The tradecraft nature of that covert-ops query-and-response sold Johnson as a “real” contract killer to his soon-to-be-arrested subjects, mainly because when people said the words, “it felt like you were in a movie,” Linklater says. And though Hit Man is fictionalized, the director still went over all of Hollandsworth’s transcripts and audio and video tapes. The pie routine “felt like crime,” he says, so Linklater had Johnson’s fictional clients act out the same exchange.

Taking an interaction that people believed to be genuine because they’d seen it in movies, and putting it in an actual movie, feels like holding a mirror up to a mirror—an infinite loop of irony. But Linklater argues that it makes sense.

Powell with Richard Robichaux.Courtesy of Netflix.

“By the time you’re really sitting down with who you think is a hit man, you’re ready to be fooled,” Linklater says. The real Johnson, Linklater says, was “just letting you kind of have your fantasy. He’s your fantasy of what a hit man is.” Meanwhile, Johnson’s clients were “almost playing like they’re in a movie.” And now, thanks to a lockdown bull session between Linklater and Powell, they are.

Cover Star Ayo Edebiri Is Making Hollywood Her Playground