FilmStack Challenge #7: The Hitman Adaptation Nobody Asked For But Should Exist
How to turn a puzzle game about rubber duck bombs into a paranoid 70s thriller where both sides let a psychotic assassin eliminate their problems until he becomes the biggest problem of all
FilmStack Challenge #7 from Charlotte Simmons:
How you would adapt a piece of media — or pieces of media — as a film if you were given the keys to a studio and a blank check.
The Operator
The Operator is an (extremely) loose adaptation of Io Interactive’s 2016 game Hitman.
Or more accurately, The Operator is an adaptation of a trailer that I made for Io Interactives 2016 game Hitman.
This film is The Parallax View meets You Only Live Twice with the dark heart of Get Carter. A paranoid 1970s thriller with 2020s James Bond aesthetics.
When a traumatized black ops operative suffers psychotic break and goes rogue, both sides let him kill their enemies until he stops following anyone’s script and spirals out of control.
And here’s the actual trailer for this film from years ago!
(As an aside, this specific trailer I don’t think was ever released, or if it was, it was briefly, so this is essentially fan art from an old game and none of this is going to be endorsed in any way by Io Interactive. Who by the way are great people who make great games and you should buy their stuff!)
Game Trailer Production
I should quickly clarify how video game trailers like this get made.
The cinematography team at my agency FWS created all the shots in this trailer from my script and shot lists. I set the shooting style with image references from movies (Gordon Willis and “James Bond as shot by Stanley Kubrick”).
Game trailers aren’t pre-rendered and cut like a movie trailer - we have to shoot these in open worlds while everything is running around you. There are only one or two shots in there that were pre-rendered and you can tell since they look a little different.
Generally, you have one person puppet the game character and another operate the camera using a game controller configured like a jib-head. They shot the material I asked for plus lots of additional stuff that they thought looked good in the game. Then I constructed the edit.
The Trailer Assignment
I’ve made a lot of ads for video games and for just about every one I imagined I was making a movie of the game. Part of that is just a side effect of trying to communicate the best things about the game. What is it that I am excited about? How do I explain that visually.
Part of this was also the deliberate house style of our trailers which was all about making things look epic and cinematic. We never shot with camera moves that couldn’t be physically replicated in a reasonable way. We almost always used 2.35 because I love scope - even though it seems 4:3 is back in fashion these days Bergman always said 4:3 was much better for the human face. And no dutch angles. Man, I hate dutch angles.
The brief we got was to make an emotionally focused promo in the style of an HBO season finale teaser. There’s not a whole lot of useful plot in the game. So for this trailer I came up with my own. It’s not explicit - I suggested it though the montage. The trailer both is and is not the story of the game.
I guess that’s the fun of trailers in general. They create Schrödinger’s movie. Is the movie you are excited to see from the trailer the same as the one they actually made? Both! Neither? They exist in superposition!
I loved playing this particular game. If you’ve not played Hitman, it’s a puzzle box game. Essentially you have a Rube Goldberg puzzle and you need to think laterally to get access to your target so you can to assassinate them.
Go and buy the Hitman game!
Even after 10 years it’s still loads of fun!
It has a good mix of slapstick (rubber ducky bombs) and dark humor (Fargo references). I think the trailer above is a good representation of the world of the game - but the game experience itself is a lot more tongue in cheek and less serious. Apologies to my friends at Io Interactive but this isn’t a story that’s going to win an Oscar.
All the better for our purposes here!
The actual Hitman Season 1 plot is as follows:
A mysterious figure manipulates an elite assassination agency into killing members of a secret SPECTRE-like cabal of high powered officials. When exposed, the cabal recruits the agency against the mysterious figure by offering secrets about their top assassin’s (the hero’s) past.
But the thing is, none of that matters really.
The game is an open world puzzle game. The plot is just an excuse to go to a new location. You have to watch and learn all the moving parts of each large open location and then figure it out and construct various absurd solutions to getting a chandelier to fall, or a car to explode at the right time. There is of course some stylized violence but, he kills people with rubber ducks and banana skins too. It’s a strategy game essentially. And for the most part the game gets away with the silly story because it really doesn’t take itself too seriously.
For the purposes of adaptation: I like the vibe, the locations and the look.
I’ve got my own story to tell.
And my movie is much darker.
The Trailer
The client wanted a psychological / emotional take for the season finale promo.
In response, I thought I’d make a trailer for the movie I wanted to see from this game. A kind of teaser, focused on the dramatic arc, the messed up psychology and the cool situations it gets the Hitman into.
Here’s a little talk though how I see this trailer for this movie:
We open on this guy struggling with a flashback of a murder. Struggling with with the trauma of his life. All those martinis, all those people falling off buildings. He’s feeling a bit guilty about it.
So we start with the emotion, then we bring in the story. People die all the time. There’s been a death and they don’t think its suspicious…
Now we see some shots to suggest we’re going to see our unnamed Hitman doing some fun James Bond-ian infiltration into unusual locations.
And now we bring in the idea of the Kompromat, and people in some kind of weird auction… This is all pure James Bond straight from You Only Live Twice. That was basically where I was coming from on this. Is it human trafficking, are they buying kompromat?
Who knows. I didn’t actually develop this movie, I just made the trailer for it!
Italy, Morrocco, Paris - more globetrotting, more places he’s killed people and done some… “investigation”.
The idea for me was I was wanting to do James Bond, but not James Bond. James Bond is not a franchise that I would want to make. The things that you could do with that now are not interesting to me anymore. I love the original Ian Fleming books but all the fun stuff has been done.
Now we complicate - he has a handler and she’s concerned that he’s going rogue. But also there is a bigger story going on. So we bring in the Wildcard antagonist - the sniper.
So the hitman needs to go and investigate and find out what’s going on. Obviously involving You Only Live Twice type Bondian investigations and luxury Japanese spas, nuclear facilities and the markets in Morocco.
Then we get to the key part of this: the bad guy is offering to help the lady who is our hero hitman’s handler: we could help each other. To me, this was the bit that’s interesting.
They’ve got a problem because they’ve got this Hitman who’s out to kill everybody that was ever associated with the stuff that they’ve got. And the other team, these bad guys are saying, “Well, do you know what this might work for us? She’s trying close it down. “We need to bring him in and stop him from killing people.” And the bad guys are saying, “Actually, he’s killing all the right people. Let’s just let him kill people.”
So you have this thing of how far are they going to let him go and which side is he on? Is he playing for their side? He’s obviously doing what the bad guys want because he’s crazy. But at the same time, the good guys, if you can call them good guys, are thinking, “Well, let’s just let him play to the, let him kill as many people as we need because it solves our problems too.”
So they’ve decided to just let him go off on this killing spree around the world - Morocco and Thailand and Paris. He’s dressed up. He’s got all the money. They haven’t shut down his accounts.
But then the problem is, as the woman in this phone call bit says… You guys are playing with fire and you’re going to get yourself killed because you don’t know what you’re doing.”
And of course, Mr. Sleazoid with the ponytail has got an axe coming to the head while he’s on the phone. No more clean sniper shot kills. The point is this is going to get grim and messy.
This is the moment where you reveal to the audience that the Hitman has completely gone off track. He’s completely lost the plot and just killing everybody. He’s a proper anti-hero.
Then we get it — it’s a re-working of Yojimbo: Make me a bunch of coffins, there’s going to be lots of dead bodes. Then we get this montage of all these cool things and moments of the story we’re going to see.
And then… I love the walking shots at the end. That was a very James Bond thing right there. We’re just making him look super cool because it’s all about walking. It’s like Dario Argento is all about walking too. You think that Argento is about horror and gore. But actually, if you watch his films, he films people walking. He’s the world’s premier filmmaker of people just walking in different situations, worried something is about to happen.
Then you have this little bit at the end where obviously the other hitman is lending a bit of pressure, taking out other people - because the other hitman’s obviously going to be doing this cleanup on our hero.
The Plot Summary
Here is what I came up with in the time bounds of this challenge. This is by no means a quality well thought through treatment, but it’s still quite fun.
Feel free to provide some better ideas in the comments!
The adaptation takes the Agent 47 character and turns it on its head. I’m not really interested in Agent 47, just the vibe.
I threw out all the clone and sci-fi stuff and turned him into a special ops guy who has a mental break, shaves his head and turns into a serial killer. He’s like John Rambo from First Blood (not the sequels) crossed with James Bond and Jack Carter from Get Carter.
The twist here is - both the “good guys” and the “bad guys” find him going on a killing spree useful. Instead of running into the forest like Rambo, the unnamed hitman has unlimited funds to globetrot on his government account and kill everyone in lots of gruesome and over the top ways.
I mean, none of it is particularly original, but never the less I think it would be a fun movie to see.
THE OPERATOR
Act 1 - A Psychotic Break
A black ops agent is given a mission to extract a hard drive from a record producer’s Malibu compound. Clean in-and-out to steal terrorist financials. Bonus points if the producer is collateral damage.
Well. It was a clean in.
Six minutes later the producer is sprawled across the studio carpet, his wife crumpled in the hallway, and the maid. And the two bodyguards. And the neighbor who stopped by for some eggs. The operative wades through a sea of bodies he never intended, the only way out is to keep killing.
But the real problems start when he plugs in the drive.
No financial records. No terrorism. Just video files: sex parties in Georgetown townhouses. Cocaine lines on Senate bathroom counters. Network anchors. Federal judges. All of it CIA funded. All of it leverage. The briefing was fiction. The targets were housecleaning.
Reality fractures. When institutional legitimacy disappears, so does his anchor to truth or reality. He pockets the drive and ghosts. Two days later he executes two people involved at a Paris fashion show and detonates a car outside the Musée d’Orsay. Seventeen injured, an international incident and no suspects. His skills are intact but his head is falling apart.
He’s going to track down and kill everyone that has ever been involved with or touched the kompromat.
Act 2 - The Manipulation
The agencies need to deal with who they are calling the “Hitman”. His old handler at the “good agency” wants extraction before he destabilizes further. But the Deputy Director at the “bad agency” persuades the CIA Director to go with a cleaner solution: permanent retirement.
They dispatch a rival operator to close the file.
Except the Deputy Director from the “bad agency” cuts a side deal with the operator’s handler to keep The Hitman alive. They’ll salt the environment with leaked surveillance, intercepted comms, doctored photographs and Hitman’s paranoid investigation will becomes a scalpel for institutional housecleaning: burning problematic assets, cutting loose threads, erasing witnesses to old sins. He’s even renting him out to a crazy Japanese billionaire.
They set up a rival operator as his guardian demon, nudging him in the desired direction. When he’s about to get killed, the operator saves him. Sometimes he sends him off course in strange, plausibly deniable ways. When witnesses surface, the rival eliminates them.
Each kill of the Hitman is increasingly baroque. He’s useful madness. Domestic terrorists in Montana. Double agents on the Riviera. Every target more reprehensible than the last.
It gradually becomes clear that the rival operator is running his own game… playing chaos for his own profit; cleaning out offshore accounts and stealing files exposed by the Hitman. The rival has no loyalty except to his own extraction plan.
The Hitman’s old handler desperately tracks him across continents, racing ahead of the kill list. She’s trying to bring him in before that window closes.
Then Phuket happens. A former British Cabinet minister with a pickaxe. A high profile corpse nowhere near anyones list except in those kompromat files. Furious, the CIA draws the line and order the “bad agency” to finish it immediately.
The rival operative checks out and hands the Hitman a kill list: nearly every handler and operative he’s ever worked with, all wrapped up to look like they’re part of a huge conspiracy. The rival’s final gift before disappearing into a sea of money and new identities.
The Hitman’s conspiracy logic becomes pure abstraction: architectural repetitions, flight schedules, weather systems; connecting dots that don’t exist. Killing according to paranoid mathematics no-one can predict, he executes a network anchor live on air during the evening broadcast.
The “bad agency” and the bosses at the “good agency” place all the blame on the Hitman’s old handler. She has to sort this out to save her career, possibly her life - and if she can, save the Hitman’s in the process.
Act 3 - The Reckoning
International agencies coordinate response but he’s well ahead of them. They’ve lost control and everyone knows it. The handler finally puts together that he’s going to kill a Japanese tech billionaire in Hokkaido.
In one last chance trying to keep him alive, the handler secretly positions herself as bait in the billionaires thermal spa outside Sapporo. The Hitman kills the billionaire with a katana, then meets the handler who tries talking him back to reality. Maybe it works, briefly, but he knows she’s complicit. He kills her anyway. A sniper round then takes him out from 800 meters in a clean headshot.
A sniper team we’ve never seen before pack up their sniper and spotting gear. Shows over. Everyone can get back to work.
The Photography
The film would of course be shot by the great cinematographer Gordon Willis. It might be hard considering his current situation, but I’m sure I know someone who knows someone.
The Final Betrayal
It was an entertaining game coming up a quick draft of movie plot from my old trailer.
Back in 2016 I loved the idea of a super dangerous special ops guy going totally out of control John Rambo in First Blood style and an amoral Smiley/McNamara type character just letting it happen because he’s killing the “right” guys. You get all the James Bond action, globetrotting and sexy locations while providing this dark psychological thematic structure.
I think part of the trick is to make the Hitman is an avenging angel. He’s reactive in the story - much like Rambo. He just keeps getting pushed. But this is a film about bad people making bad - though tempting - choices. Just the same as watching Hannibal Lecter or Dexter killing nasty people that “deserve” it. There’s no way there’s not a lot of bodies in this picture - so I’m imagining this is also played straight but with a little tounge-in-cheek absurdity, which is not so far from the game (though I might draw the line at killer rubber ducks).
I think the trailer works because it captures the Bond-ian Hitman fantasy (luxury locations, impossible infiltrations, being the most dangerous man in the room) and secret society style machinations.
But any good adaptation requires betrayal.
This was so refreshing to read, David! I'm a hobbyist game designer myself, and I'm frequently disturbed by how many games blur the line between gameplay and narrative to the ultimate detriment of both. The way you've described The Operator here, it seems that mistake wasn't made.
I'm really fond of how the thematic aspect of your adaptation echoes the game's puzzle-centric gameplay. Just as players have to connect the dots/dissect the logic of a level's moving parts to make the kill, so too does your operator character get lost in his paranoid mathematics in order to complete his objective - and objective determined by him rather than the agency (a parallel for the game that you're adapting here), thereby compromising the macro significance of his choices.
Scrumptious stuff. Thank you for this!