A couple of decades ago, back in 2001, Oscar-nominated writer-director Richard Linklater received a phone call from his pal Skip Hollandsworth at Texas Monthly. The journalist had just completed an article about Gary Johnson, a part-time college professor with the unlikely side hustle of moonlighting as a pretend hit man for the district attorney’s office in Houston, helping prosecutors apprehend anyone looking to hire a professional assassin. Hollandsworth thought that Linklater might be interested in adapting the story for the screen, and he was right.

The filmmaker immediately sensed there was something uniquely cinematic about the man’s unconventional biography, yet he spent years ruminating over the story without hitting upon the right approach. He and Hollandsworth adapted another of the writer’s Texas Monthly stories for 2011’s Bernie, but the Johnson article was a different beast. “It always stayed with me over the years, but it never really coalesced into a movie,” says Linklater, director of such classics as 1995’s Before Sunrise and 2014’s Boyhood. “It was on a back burner in my mind for sure.”

What it took to finally nail the adaptation was the right creative collaborator — in this case, actor Glen Powell, known for blockbuster turns in movies including Twisters, Anyone but You, and Top Gun: Maverick. Together, Linklater and Powell wrote the script for Hit Man, the genre-bending romantic comedy-thriller inspired by Johnson’s stranger-than-fiction true-life story.

The film sees Powell initially tone down his megawatt star power to play Johnson as a sweet, sensitive everyman, but that all changes after Gary meets the mysterious Madison (Adria Arjona), a would-be client who falls hard for his assassin alter-ego, the dangerous and mercurial Ron. “There was one line near the end of the article about Gary Johnson finding this woman who was trying to kill her husband, but he saw the humanity in her,” Powell explains. “That relationship turned out to be key to the entire movie.”

The film wouldn’t have taken shape, however, were it not for Powell’s longstanding relationship with Linklater. The pair met when Powell, at the age of 14, appeared in the filmmaker’s 2006 feature Fast Food Nation. In the years since, they’d maintained a friendship, with Powell starring in Linklater’s 2016 coming-of-age story Everybody Wants Some!! and 2022’s animated entry Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood. “There’s no one better at understanding the intricate nature of what makes humans human,” Powell says. “He thinks about these things in a way that no one else I’ve ever met does.”

So, years later, when producer Michael Costigan shared the original Texas Monthly article with Powell in the spring of 2020, the actor, excited by the idea of adapting the piece, reached out to Linklater “to figure out a way to make the story work as a movie.”

Reengaging with the idea of adapting the article, Linklater embarked on exploratory conversations with Powell. Soon, the pair determined that the story needed to be anything but a traditional police procedural. Instead, they set out to create what Linklater describes as “a comedy about murder” brimming with tension and off-the-charts chemistry between Ron and Madison. “It’s a fantasy at the end of the day,” Powell says. “We [wanted to make] a film that is not only fun, but also sexy and thrilling.”

Linklater and Powell embarked on a period of intensive research, studying real murder-for-hire cases and watching hours of surveillance tapes before sitting down to write the screenplay. The director also spoke extensively with Johnson himself, though Powell never met the man — a decision that was intentional on Linklater’s part, as he wanted his star to feel free to craft a wholly unique take on the character. “We were creating a moment in time for Gary,” Powell says. “Sometimes when you meet the real-life people, you meet them in a different phase of their lives, and it can taint who they used to be.”

Powell had previously written the 2011 short film J.A.W., in addition to several unproduced feature film scripts, but the process of working with Linklater on Hit Man was uniquely collaborative. The duo, who also served as producers on the film, worked together in a shared document while chatting with one another, parsing story beats, tone, and character development. “We’d be on the phone while we were writing,” Powell says. “There were times when he would take a section, and I would take a section. For the most part, we were working together in real time.”

Powell and Linklater baked real details from Johnson’s life into the narrative but they also took creative license in imagining the romance that develops between Powell’s Gary/Ron and Madison. Explains Linklater: “The film hits a lot of notes — comedy, noir, thriller, psychological study — while examining most of all the concept of identity and how fixed our personalities may or may not be. I always approached it like a film noir or a little bit of a sexy thriller. But on a plot level, it’s just a guy who gets in a little too deep. His passions lead him in a direction where he’s deceiving someone he’s in love with while being someone else.”

For the filmmaker, who received three of his five career Oscar nominations for writing (Before Sunset, Before Midnight, and Boyhood), partnering with Powell to write Hit Man, and later directing the actor in the leading role, was a true delight. “He’s just a team captain, there for everybody, hardworking,” Linklater says. “I always say that it’s like a sports team. If the best guy on the team is also the hardest working, you might win. But if the person who is number one on the call sheet is the pain in the ass, it’s not going to end well for everybody. It’s really important for that person to be very generous with the other actors, to give everything, and to be a great collaborator. And that’s what Glen is.”

Powell and Linklater’s commitment paid off handsomely, with critics raving about Hit Man during the film’s buzzy run on the 2023 festival circuit up through its May 2024 release. For Powell, the acclaim was tremendously exciting, though the actor wishes that Johnson, who passed away in 2022, could have enjoyed some of the glory. “I’m really glad we have that tribute to him at the end of the movie [where he include photos of him] because I think he would have really appreciated the story,” Powell says. “Rick had a lot of reverence for Gary and who he was.”

But, the actor notes, there’s nothing at all bittersweet about sharing his first feature film credit with Linklater. “It’s pretty damn cool to do it with your hero and friend,” he says. “To have my name next to Richard Linklater’s name is a dream come true.”