Glen Powell explains how to create a murder ending

Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for ‘How To Make A Killing,’ now in theaters.

Growing up with an FBI father John Patton Ford”s bedtime stories and dinner table conversations often included criminals. Perhaps this is where his fascination with the world of crime began..

“There was always something really familiar about those things,” Ford says. manifold. “I grew up thinking of them as people, not the bad guys in the movies.”

Both of Ford’s films deal with immorality. The writer-director’s debut feature, ‘Emily the Criminal’, tells the story of a college graduate who, burdened by debt, becomes a fake shopper as a result of an elaborate credit card scam. His latest, “How To Make A Killing,” centers on blue-collar Becket Redfellow. glen powellAccording to Ford (“the hardest working person in the business”), her mother was abandoned by her obscenely wealthy family when she became pregnant with him. To escape his ordinary life in New Jersey, Beckett decides to kill seven of his relatives to claim his $28 billion inheritance.

The A24 film is a loose reinterpretation of the black comedy “Kind Hearts and Corollas,” which Ford first saw in 2012. “I was quite surprised to see how modern it was,” he says. “The film was released in England in 1949, but it grapples with a problem that seems so prescient: When would this concept not be relevant?”

“How To Make A Killing” follows a similar beat to its predecessor. Becket succeeds in killing each family member, and in the process falls for his dead cousin’s girlfriend, Ruth (Jessica Henwick). In the end, he is arrested and sentenced to death, not for the murder he actually committed, but for the murder of her husband after being framed by his childhood crush and modern-day femme fatale, Julia (Margaret Qualley).

As it turns out, Julia, who visited Beckett in prison just hours before his execution, actually had a will exonerating her husband on the condition that he hand over his inheritance to her. Beckett obliges.

Here’s where Ford’s take on British crime films differs most from the source material. When Becket is released from prison, Ruth waits in the parking lot, but ends up confronting him face to face. As she leaves, she reveals Julia waiting outside a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, wearing a funeral black Chanel set. Without a word, Becket went to her, got into the car, and the two tearfully drove back to the sprawling Redfellow estate on Long Island. Compare this to “Kind Hearts and Garlands,” where the two women sit outside the carriage (spoiler: Louis, the Beckett of that film, chooses Cibella, the Julia, of his own will).

“For a modern audience, I don’t think anyone would enjoy having Ruth standing next to them,” says Henwick. “Ruth had to withdraw herself. It’s so depressing.”

Although Becket ultimately evades justice in the traditional sense, Henwick explains, Ruth’s exit leaves Becket “a completely helpless man.” “(Ruth) has taken away his choice for joy, and Julia is not going to be the life he actually wants. She’s going to be a terror, and she’s holding his fate in his hands. So this is his comeuppance.”

Ford agrees: “At the end of the movie, he gets what he thought he always wanted, but it’s too late. Now he knows he would have been better off living a different kind of life. So he achieves his goal, but only after realizing he doesn’t actually want it. There’s an intentional irony.”

Originally, Ford had a different, “much more serious” ending in mind. In the early script, Beckett is waiting for him as he emerges from prison with Ruth, who gave birth to his child while he was incarcerated. “He goes towards her and then realizes Julia is there too,” says Ford. “And in that moment, he changes his mind and decides to leave Ruth, leave the child, and go be with Julia, because he realizes that’s who he really is after all.”

We had to change it for a few reasons. Most notable is that Ford agreed that it would be “particularly punishing for the audience” who had spent the previous hour and 45 minutes trying to understand and even sympathize with Becket. That’s one of the advantages of casting Powell, “the human’s golden retriever,” to play a serial killer, Ford says. You want to root for him!

“Glen is an unlikely candidate for killing eight people. He’s such an irrepressibly good guy,” explains Ford. “He has the air of someone who works really hard and strives toward a goal. There’s a popular feeling that he’s trying to be a movie star, he’s in Tom Cruise’s orbit. And with Glenn, (the audience) would have thought, ‘This guy seems to think he’s doing the right thing. This guy’s just trying to do his best.’” And the irony is that he has no moral or ethical standards.”

But the ending was so bad. “I think the studio was a little strange.” Ford added: “They said, ‘You can’t have people watch this whole movie and punish them at that level.’”

However, as Henwick points out, Becket’s choice of Julia would have been faithful to the character. “Is it really exhausting and sad to think that most people would make that choice? When faced with (Ruth) and her beat up Honda, or Julia and her billions of dollars, I think most people would choose Julia.”

Another reason for the change is that it would have left Beckett completely unscathed (out of prison, still a billionaire, still in love, or at least in lust) rather than ending up with a free, wealthy, but meaningless life.

“I didn’t want to completely let him off the hook and avoid the whole thing,” Ford says. “But I didn’t want it to be completely punishing and one-dimensional. I wanted it to be complex. I wanted him to gain something, but then lose something and have complicated feelings about it.”

And in case anyone needs an explanation, the tears Beckett sheds as she walks through the gates of the estate are not happy ones. “He will definitely regret it, but he may not admit it,” Ford confirms. “Or admit it to yourself.”