Is Hit Man based on a true story? Director Richard Linklater explains
The crime flick has just arrived on Netflix.
When Richard Linklater's latest film Hit Man premiered at last year's Venice Film Festival, it was greeted with a rapturous reception – and nine months later the crime flick has arrived on Netflix.
The film stars Anyone But You and Top Gun: Maverick star Glen Powell – who also co-wrote the script with Linklater – as a man with a very unusual profession: a philosophy teacher who works a part-time job posing as a hitman to help law enforcement catch would-be-killers.
In the film, Johnson eventually finds himself romantically involved with one of the prospective clients, leading to a strange situation in which he must keep up the hitman persona or risk losing his new love interest – which understandably leads to some tense and unintended consequences.
But is the film based on a true story? Read on for everything you need to know, including exclusive insights from Linklater himself.
Is Hit Man based on a true story?
Yes – albeit only partially. The film is loosely based on a 2001 Texas Monthly article written by journalist Skip Hollandsworth about a real man named Gary Johnson who really did work both as a part-time teacher and an undercover fake hit man.
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Originally from rural Louisiana – where he began his law enforcement career as a sheriff’s deputy in the 1970s – he went on to work as an investigator for the district attorney’s office after relocating to Houston, and it was here that he began taking part in sting operations and posing as contract killers in 1989.
After working on over 100 cases, Johnson passed away in 2022.
"When I read this article, on Gary Johnson, the undercover fake hitman, that was in 2001," Linklater told RadioTimes.com of his first encounter with the story. "So I read that article back then and I was so intrigued with that character of like, 'Oh, wow... What an interesting guy. What an interesting job.'
"I thought, this is about the weirdest job I've ever heard of. So there was just something there in that kind of true crime world, there was something there, but the film, at that point based on the article, was just kind of the same thing - where he would meet a client, some colourful client, and then they'd get arrested. And it was just that [that] happened."
Where the film strays into fictional territory is the story of Gary's relationship with a prospective client, played in the film by Adria Arjona. This aspect of the movie was entirely made up by Linklater and Powell – although it does still have its roots in a real case featured in Hollandsworth's article.
"Toward the end of that article, [Johnson] does let one young woman off," Linklater explains.
"She's trying to have her husband killed. And he's like, you know, you just need to get therapy, get a divorce, you know, get your life together. He lets her off. And so I think Skip was kind of humanising Gary a little bit, you know."
He added: "It was Glen who kind of pushed me. He's like, 'Well, what if we just kind of kept going, you know. What if you can do something that didn't really happen in the real world? Let's take this character and go on a wild ride.'
"So once we did that, we were off to the races with this idea like, well, 'What if she got back in touch with him? What if she kind of asked him out? What if they started dating?'
"He's trapped in his hitman persona – it becomes kind of a story of identity and self. And it put us in some genres and kind of deepened the stakes of the movie in a certain way – and deepened the character."
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Of course, there are other aspects of the film that, although drawn from details in the article, are exaggerated for the screen – including the elaborate nature of some of the disguises Johnson wears while posing as different hitmen tailored to each individual client.
"The real Gary Johnson did that," Linklater said. "He kind of adjusted his appearance a little bit, but nowhere near what we do in the film.
"You know, it's a comedy, and Glen went totally off the deep end into these characters, the wigs and the accents. He was studying those accents and reading books on, like, body language, and just really working out these characters.
"It was fun to see him so obsessed with it, but it's an important element to the movie."
Meanwhile, the film also includes a couple of references to some of the real cases in which Gary Johnson was involved: for example, there really was a teenager who wanted to pay him in video games.
So, the short answer is that Hit Man has its roots in a real story, but much of what we see unfolding in the film is completely fictional.
Hitman is streaming on Netflix from Friday 7th June 2024 – sign up from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.
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