The Texas Democrat likes to show how time works on the faces of actors like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in the trilogy that began with Before Sunrise (1995). He’s already doing it again with Paul Mescal in Merrily We Roll Along, an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical of the same name: “We’ve already shot the finale and the first three chapters, because it’s a chronologically reversed film that ends with the youngest protagonists. I don’t know what else to say about a film we won’t see finished for another 17 years. It’s simply my favourite musical and I think it will look better in the cinema than on stage.”
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During his visit to Barcelona in April, where he received the honorary award at the BCN Film Fest, he also admitted that he had just started shooting a film about Jean Luc Godard and the making of At the End of the Escape: “It’s set in 1959 and it features all the leaders of the Nouvelle Vague. Every filmmaker has a film about a film, and this will be mine”. For now, next Friday he releases Hit Man. A Killer by Chance, a genre mash-up as fresh as it is philosophical. In part, it’s a biopic because it’s based on the experiences of Gary Johnson, a shy college professor (played by Glenn Powell) who, in his spare time, posed as a hit man on behalf of the New Orleans police: he offered his services, some guys hired him, and he ended up in handcuffs.
It’s also a romantic comedy disguised as a thriller: all goes well until he runs into Adrià Arjona, a battered woman who wants to kill her husband: “It’s not my MeToo film,” the filmmaker clarifies. The beautiful Puerto Rican woman would better fit the archetype of the lifelong femme fatale. “I’ve always liked to mix genres,” he explains, and gets defensive when he’s criticized for not making a Western as Texas’ most famous filmmaker: “Pure Westerns don’t interest me much, because there are three eras of my country’s history where everything is a myth – you know, ‘print the legend’ – and I prefer to have a foot in reality with stories like Gary Johnson’s.” I’ve already done something like a western with The Newton Boys, a movie that started out as a western and ended up as a mob movie.”
