‘How to Make a Killing’ Director Explains That Twisted Ending, Rewriting the Final Scene and Why ‘Golden Retriever’ Glen Powell Made the Perfect Serial Killer
SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses spoilers for “How To Make A Killing,” now playing in theaters
Growing up with a father in the FBI, John Patton Ford’s bedtime stories and dinner table conversations often involved criminals. That’s probably where his fascination with the world of crime originated.
“There was always something really familiar about those things to me,” Ford tells Variety. “I grew up thinking of them as people, and not as bad guys in a movie.”
Both of Ford’s films deal with the immoral; the writer-director’s debut feature, “Emily the Criminal” focuses on a college graduate who, saddled with debt, becomes a dummy shopper in an elaborate credit card scam; his latest, “How To Make A Killing,” centers on the blue-collar Becket Redfellow (played by Glen Powell, the “hardest working guy in the business,” according to Ford), whose mother was disowned by her obscenely wealthy family when she got pregnant with him. In an effort to escape his ordinary life in New Jersey, Becket decides to kill off his seven relatives to claim a $28 billion inheritance.
The A24 movie is a loose reimagining of the black comedy “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” which Ford first watched back in 2012. “I was pretty stunned with how contemporary it was,” he says. “It’s a movie that came out in the U.K. in 1949, and yet it wrestles with issues that just seem so prescient. At what time wouldn’t this concept be relevant?”
“How To Make A Killing” follows similar beats as its precursor; Becket succeeds in killing off each family member, falling for his deceased cousin’s girlfriend, Ruth (Jessica Henwick), in the process. In the end, he gets arrested and sentenced to death, not for any of the murders he actually committed, but instead after being framed by Julia (Margaret Qualley), his childhood crush and a modern-day femme fatale, for the murder of her husband.
As it turns out, Julia, who visits Becket in prison hours before his execution, actually has her late husband’s suicide note that would exonerate him — on the condition that he signs over his inheritance to her. Becket obliges.
What follows is where Ford’s take on the British crime film most differs from the source material. When Becket is released from prison, Ruth is waiting in the parking lot — but only to end things with him face to face. She leaves, revealing Julia, dressed in a funereal black Chanel set, waiting outside a chauffeured Rolls-Royce. Wordlessly, Becket goes to her, gets in the car and the two are driven back to the gargantuan Redfellow estate on Long Island, with tears in his eyes. Compare it to “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” where both women are sitting outside in their carriages (spoiler: the Becket of that film, Louis, chooses Sibella, the Julia, of his own volition).
“For a modern audience, I don’t think anyone would have enjoyed Ruth standing by him after all of that,” says Henwick. “Ruth had to remove herself. It’s just too depressing.”
While Becket ultimately evades justice in the traditional sense, Ruth’s exit leaves Becket a “totally disempowered man,” explains Henwick. “[Ruth] has taken away his option for joy, and Julia is not going to be the life that he actually wants. She’s going to be a terror, and she held his fate in his hands. So it’s his comeuppance.”
Ford agrees: “At the end of the movie, he gets what he always thought he wanted, but it’s too late, and now he knows he would have been better off with a different kind of life. So he gets his goal, but only after he realizes that he actually doesn’t want it. There’s an irony there that’s deliberate.”
Originally, Ford had a different, “way more severe” ending in mind. In the initial script, Becket gets out of jail with Ruth, who had given birth to their child while he was incarcerated, waiting for him. “He’s going towards her, and then he sees that Julia is there as well,” says Ford. “And in that moment, he changes his mind and decides to leave Ruth, leave the child, and go with Julia, because he realizes that’s who he really is after all this time.”
It had to change for a few reasons — the most notable one being that Ford agreed it would’ve been “especially punishing for audiences” who’d spent the past hour and 45 minutes attempting to understand, and even sympathize, with Becket. That’s one of the perks of casting Powell, “a golden retriever of a human being,” to play a serial killer, says Ford: you want to root for him!
“Glen is kind of an unlikely candidate to go and, like, kill eight people; he’s just irrepressibly good,” explains Ford. “He has the air of someone who is working really hard and working towards a goal. There’s a popular feeling that he’s working at being a movie star, and he’s on this Tom Cruise trajectory. And I thought, if it’s Glen, [the audience will] be like, ‘This guy thinks he’s doing the right thing. This guy is just trying to do his best.’ And the irony is that he has absolutely no moral or ethical code whatsoever.”
But that ending went a beat too far. “I think the studio was kind of freaked out,” Ford adds. “They were like, ‘You can’t have people sit through this entire movie and then punish them at that level.’”
Though, as Henwick points out, Becket choosing Julia would’ve felt true to the character. “Is it really jaded and sad to say I think most people would make the same choice as him? When confronted with [Ruth] and her beat-up Honda, or Julia and her billions, I do think most people would go with Julia.”
Another reason for the change was that it would’ve left Becket entirely unscathed — out of jail, still a billionaire, still in love, or at least lust — rather than how it does end for him: free, rich, but doomed to a life devoid of meaning.
“I didn’t want to just completely let him off the hook and get away with everything,” says Ford. “And yet I didn’t want it to be totally punishing and one-dimensional. I wanted it to be complex. I wanted him to get something but lose something and have mixed feelings about it.”
And in case anyone needs clarification, Becket’s tears as he’s back through the gates of the estate aren’t happy ones. “He will certainly come to regret things, but he may not admit it,” Ford confirms. “Or admit it to himself.”
Growing up with a father in the FBI, John Patton Ford’s bedtime stories and dinner table conversations often involved criminals. That’s probably where his fascination with the world of crime originated.
“There was always something really familiar about those things to me,” Ford tells Variety. “I grew up thinking of them as people, and not as bad guys in a movie.”
Both of Ford’s films deal with the immoral; the writer-director’s debut feature, “Emily the Criminal” focuses on a college graduate who, saddled with debt, becomes a dummy shopper in an elaborate credit card scam; his latest, “How To Make A Killing,” centers on the blue-collar Becket Redfellow (played by Glen Powell, the “hardest working guy in the business,” according to Ford), whose mother was disowned by her obscenely wealthy family when she got pregnant with him. In an effort to escape his ordinary life in New Jersey, Becket decides to kill off his seven relatives to claim a $28 billion inheritance.
The A24 movie is a loose reimagining of the black comedy “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” which Ford first watched back in 2012. “I was pretty stunned with how contemporary it was,” he says. “It’s a movie that came out in the U.K. in 1949, and yet it wrestles with issues that just seem so prescient. At what time wouldn’t this concept be relevant?”
“How To Make A Killing” follows similar beats as its precursor; Becket succeeds in killing off each family member, falling for his deceased cousin’s girlfriend, Ruth (Jessica Henwick), in the process. In the end, he gets arrested and sentenced to death, not for any of the murders he actually committed, but instead after being framed by Julia (Margaret Qualley), his childhood crush and a modern-day femme fatale, for the murder of her husband.
As it turns out, Julia, who visits Becket in prison hours before his execution, actually has her late husband’s suicide note that would exonerate him — on the condition that he signs over his inheritance to her. Becket obliges.
What follows is where Ford’s take on the British crime film most differs from the source material. When Becket is released from prison, Ruth is waiting in the parking lot — but only to end things with him face to face. She leaves, revealing Julia, dressed in a funereal black Chanel set, waiting outside a chauffeured Rolls-Royce. Wordlessly, Becket goes to her, gets in the car and the two are driven back to the gargantuan Redfellow estate on Long Island, with tears in his eyes. Compare it to “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” where both women are sitting outside in their carriages (spoiler: the Becket of that film, Louis, chooses Sibella, the Julia, of his own volition).
“For a modern audience, I don’t think anyone would have enjoyed Ruth standing by him after all of that,” says Henwick. “Ruth had to remove herself. It’s just too depressing.”
While Becket ultimately evades justice in the traditional sense, Ruth’s exit leaves Becket a “totally disempowered man,” explains Henwick. “[Ruth] has taken away his option for joy, and Julia is not going to be the life that he actually wants. She’s going to be a terror, and she held his fate in his hands. So it’s his comeuppance.”
Ford agrees: “At the end of the movie, he gets what he always thought he wanted, but it’s too late, and now he knows he would have been better off with a different kind of life. So he gets his goal, but only after he realizes that he actually doesn’t want it. There’s an irony there that’s deliberate.”
Originally, Ford had a different, “way more severe” ending in mind. In the initial script, Becket gets out of jail with Ruth, who had given birth to their child while he was incarcerated, waiting for him. “He’s going towards her, and then he sees that Julia is there as well,” says Ford. “And in that moment, he changes his mind and decides to leave Ruth, leave the child, and go with Julia, because he realizes that’s who he really is after all this time.”
It had to change for a few reasons — the most notable one being that Ford agreed it would’ve been “especially punishing for audiences” who’d spent the past hour and 45 minutes attempting to understand, and even sympathize, with Becket. That’s one of the perks of casting Powell, “a golden retriever of a human being,” to play a serial killer, says Ford: you want to root for him!
“Glen is kind of an unlikely candidate to go and, like, kill eight people; he’s just irrepressibly good,” explains Ford. “He has the air of someone who is working really hard and working towards a goal. There’s a popular feeling that he’s working at being a movie star, and he’s on this Tom Cruise trajectory. And I thought, if it’s Glen, [the audience will] be like, ‘This guy thinks he’s doing the right thing. This guy is just trying to do his best.’ And the irony is that he has absolutely no moral or ethical code whatsoever.”
But that ending went a beat too far. “I think the studio was kind of freaked out,” Ford adds. “They were like, ‘You can’t have people sit through this entire movie and then punish them at that level.’”
Though, as Henwick points out, Becket choosing Julia would’ve felt true to the character. “Is it really jaded and sad to say I think most people would make the same choice as him? When confronted with [Ruth] and her beat-up Honda, or Julia and her billions, I do think most people would go with Julia.”
Another reason for the change was that it would’ve left Becket entirely unscathed — out of jail, still a billionaire, still in love, or at least lust — rather than how it does end for him: free, rich, but doomed to a life devoid of meaning.
“I didn’t want to just completely let him off the hook and get away with everything,” says Ford. “And yet I didn’t want it to be totally punishing and one-dimensional. I wanted it to be complex. I wanted him to get something but lose something and have mixed feelings about it.”
And in case anyone needs clarification, Becket’s tears as he’s back through the gates of the estate aren’t happy ones. “He will certainly come to regret things, but he may not admit it,” Ford confirms. “Or admit it to himself.”