The BCN Film Fest applauds Richard Linklater and his way of processing the world through cinema

For Richard Linklater (Houston, 1960) everything started when, at 20 years old, he began watching movies. "I realized that I processed the world through cinema. That's how my brain works," the director explained this Friday, the last day of the Barcelona Sant Jordi International Film Festival (BCN Film Fest). He left his job on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and dedicated his savings to start filming. "I was lucky. I became obsessed. To be a director, you have to be a bit of a geek, cinema has to be your life and, of course, it has been mine," he added before a dedicated audience that had just applauded his latest film, Hitman, a romantic thriller with comedic touches, starring Glen Powell and Adria Arjona. The film, which closes a week of cinephilia and glamour at Cines Verdi, has sold out tickets for the different sessions that have been programmed.

The American director, a reference for independent cinema with titles such as Before Sunrise and Boyhood, based the film on a true story. Powell found it in the newspaper and passed it on to the director, whom he already knew, first, because they had grown up in the same city and, later, because they had worked together on titles such as Fast Food Nation (2006). It was the middle of the pandemic and they began writing the script about the life of Gary Johnson, a man who combined his job as a professor with that of a mole for the police, posing as a hitman, a good excuse to ramble about who we are and if we can really change.

Powell, known for romantic and action films, including the recent Anyone But You with Sydney Sweeney, becomes the central axis of Hitman, between the clumsy and introverted Gary and the multiple personalities he transforms into as an effective hitman, depending on the client, with nods to American Psycho. Everything goes haywire when he becomes the attractive and determined Ron and meets Maddy, who wants to kill her possessive husband. Sparks immediately fly, unleashing a wild plot of attraction and deception. "I think Powell is much more like Ron than Gary," confessed the director, whom journalists' questions made him think about a future sequel, where, he said, Maddy will once again take the lead.

Linklater has taken advantage of his visit to the Verdi cinemas to collect the BCN Film Fest's Honorary Award, a few days after finishing the filming of his movie about the nouvelle vague in Paris, "a kind of comedy" with which he fulfills the cliché that "every filmmaker has to make a movie about making movies." "I always have mixed feelings about awards, they make me feel, am I old? Am I at the end of my career?, but it's an honor to be here. I always look for any excuse to visit Barcelona," he stated.

He said this accompanied by the festival director, Conxita Casanovas, happy to have brought him because he is "a director dreamed of by any festival." Casanovas will also focus on making the most of the hours they will spend together to see if she learns to stretch time as only he knows how, "if his cinema has anything, it's the management of time," in addition to achieving almost a miracle, being applauded at the same time by the public and by the complicated critics. Surely the adaptation he is preparing of Stephen Sondheim's musical Merrily We Roll Along, which he will record over 20 years, will do it again. He also has Paul Mescal.