Hit Man

To describe Hit Man is very odd for me. As a film it is a complete failure. Everything I wanted it to be, it wasn’t, and what I didn’t want in it was there.

The movie was originally intended to be a clever little gangster film, about double crosses. Jack, the Hit Man, is sent to kill Richard, an old high school friend who is scamming money from Jack’s boss. Jack, realizing how much money is being scammed goes and starts working with Richard. Mickey, Jack’s crime friend, is sent out to kill Jack. Jack meets a girl named Sheila, who then cheats on Jack with a guy she met, who happens to be Mickey. Richard starts scamming from Jack as well; Jack finds this out and kills Richard and takes the bosses money. He wants to run away with Sheila, but Sheila tells Jack that she is leaving him for Mickey. Mickey comes in to kill Jack, but accidentally kills Sheila. Jack, realizing his old friend is after him, sets him up, making him look like he stole the bosses money, and the boss has Mickey killed, while Jack gets away with the cash. It was fairly complicated.

The script of the film

The film was to be my final student film, and it was slated with a rather large budget, all funded by myself, of course. Forty minutes long was the original idea for the cut. Color Negative. The problem however, was that there wasn’t as much time to shoot all of the details as I originally had hoped. It costs quite a bit of money to have professional (albeit unknown) actors shipped in from Manhattan, feed them, and have a crew who have their own movies and projects to work on, all to coincide with each other. I cut the script down without really affecting the story too much, the basics were still there, and the odd subplots weren’t.

When I was done shooting, my teachers kept making me cut after cut, making drastic changes in the way I had envisioned the movie. I was being threatened with not receiving a good grade, or not graduating at all at some points and after awhile I had lost scope of what my film was trying to say. Also, I was doing many jobs at once on my film, while concentrating on all of my other classes and holding full time employment; I became completely misdirected. In the end, my film became a muddled farce, with lots of black humor. If I was not so set on what I was doing, I perhaps could have changed the outlook of the film, playing up to the inherit comedy within and ended up with a fantastic movie. Now I am left with a twenty minute, ten thousand-dollar nightmare. Some people like it, but if I had been left to use my own creative direction instead of kowtowing to my failed teachers, I think the film would have been something else.

The chronicles of my film editing and all of the madness I had to cope with my professors is documented in my thesis paper.

Back to Krisbee's Movie Page