You’re only alive because I’ve chosen not to have you killed. Just remember that,” Richard Linklater tells me, with a suspiciously evil grin. We’re in Soho talking about Hit Man, the new Netflix film from the 63-year-old director of Boyhood and the Before trilogy. Linklater, today all in black, his hair long and greying, is fascinated by our obsession with hired killers, and the way they spill over from the big screen and the pages of crime fiction into real life. “It’s where pop culture myths meet reality,” he says. “I had a lot of knowledge and interest in that world, because it was so bizarre. To me, I guess, it was always a comment on consumer culture. That you could just purchase the death of someone else so easily, like your groceries or something. But it’s very common.”
In the real world, he says, “there’s this cold-blooded killer out there who, for money, will kill your ass. My darkest impulse after all these years is that people are empowered by the notion that they can hire someone to kill someone, if things got bad. You know what I mean? It’s a last resort.”
