Hit Man, now on Netflix, is not your average hit man movie. Instead, this collaboration from director Richard Linklater and star Glen Powell is a dark, playful, and at times, esoteric, comedy loosely based on a true story of a fake hit man. His name was Gary Johnson, and even though he was the most sought-after assassin in the Houston area, he actually wasn’t a hit man at all. He was an undercover cop.
Linklater and Powell co-wrote the script for Hit Man, adapting it from a 2001 Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth of the same name. Though the real Gary Johnson died at the age of 77 in 2022, Linklater told Decider in a recent interview that he was, as the movie’s coda indicates, “the chillest dude imaginable” and was happy to let Linklater use his life as inspiration for a film. Linklater and Powell made quite a few changes from Johnson’s actual life—like making up an entire imaginary relationship with one of Gary’s clients (played by Adria Arjona). But one of the smaller changes made from the true story was moving the production from Houston, Texas to New Orleans, Louisiana.
Read on to learn more about the Hit Man filming locations.
Where was Hit Man filmed?
Hit Man was filmed on location in New Orleans, despite the fact that the real Gary Johnson lived in worked in Houston, Texas. Initially, director Richard Linklater did intend to film Hit Man in Texas—which is also Linklater’s home state. He still lives in Austin to this day. But filming in New Orleans was “more practical,” the director told Decider in a recent interview.
“When you’re working on a super low budget, and you pieced together financing, that tax incentive money starts to take up a big percentage of your budget,” Linklater explained. “I had a producer who was like, ‘Oh, how quaint you could shoot at home.’ I don’t even live in Houston, so it’d still be a location shoot. But it just made sense for us to go somewhere else.”
That said, Linklater said he intentionally chose New Orleans, because he felt the city fit the content and themes of his film. “We could have gone anywhere— New Mexico, Georgia, you could go to any number of places,” he said. “It was easy to transpose this from Houston to New Orleans, put it like that. New Orleans has even more of a profile. You don’t have to explain New Orleans. People understand New Orleans as this bigger-than-life character. Fun place, but with a potentially dark underbelly. There’s a certain sometimes lawlessness or volatility in New Orleans that kind of goes with the city. There are a lot of characters there. It was an easy translation.”
With the exception of two scenes filmed at a swamp just outside the city, all of Hit Man was filmed in New Orleans. In an interview for the Hit Man press notes, production designer Bruce
Curtis spoke to trying to avoid the more cliché New Orleans locations, saying, “I needed our locations to give me something back, more than just walls. New Orleans is a busy town with a lot going on there. I think that we did a pretty good job of skirting the normalcy of New Orleans. I was really concentrating on the behind the scenes, off Bourbon Street, out of the French Quarter.”
One location Hit Man did film at was a beloved diner in New Orleans, the Please-U-Restuarant, a cafe where Powell’s Gary likes to meet his clients. (This was inspired by the real Gary Johnson, who liked to meet his clients at Denny’s in Houston.) Other New Orleans locations featured in the film include the former Lee Circle (featuring a brief shot of the empty pedestal that previously featured a statue of Robert E. Lee), the University of New Orleans, Pho Bang Restaurant, Ted’s Frostop (where Gary and Madison run into the dirty cop, Jasper), and St. Charles Avenue.
For a full break down of the Hit Man New Orleans filming locations, check out Mike Scott’s report for NOLA.com.
