'They just don't make $6m indie-type films any more'

Director Richard Linklater talks to Patrick Smith about the fascination behind his film 'Hit Man', the 'reduction of the male', and why 'Dazed and Confused' wouldn't happen now

"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.”

It’s a pitch-black thought. Hit Man, on the other hand, is a blast of pure dopamine, a tautly plotted crime caper that sizzles and pops in the sweaty streets of New Orleans. Loosely based on a 2001 true-crime article in Texas Monthly, it stars Glen Powell as Gary Johnson, a nebbishy college professor who has a side hustle with the local police department, setting up stings by posing as different hit men.

On the surface, it may seem like a departure for a director as esoteric and experimental as Linklater. After all, this is a man who first came to attention in 1990 for the quiet, Generation X existentialism of Slacker, before leaving an indelible mark with his ambling paean to Seventies high school in Dazed and

Confused (1993); alienation, meanwhile, pervades his 2001 animation Waking Life.