The premise of Hit Man might sound incredible — who would ever imagine that a mild-mannered police department employee could transform himself into a diverse variety of personas, all to catch people in the act of trying to hire an assassin? (Trying to hire an assassin is illegal, it turns out.) Yet the new Richard Linklater film, premiering June 7th on Netflix, is directly inspired by a Texas Monthly article about the real-life Gary Johnson (played in the movie by Glen Powell) and the fascinating work he once did.

As the story progresses and Gary gets drawn deeper into a web of deception, though, it deviates dramatically from reality. And as stars Adria Arjona and Retta explain to Consequence, that journey was a deeply collaborative one.

From the beginning, Arjona was conscious of the story’s origins. “It’s wild that a lot of this is based on true events, like that kid that tries to kill his mom, and he wants to pay the hitman with video games and some coins. That happened, and that’s part of Gary’s story,” she says.

And she’s also playing a character based on one of the real people in Skip Hollandsworth’s article: An unnamed woman who wants to hire a hit man to escape her abusive partner. “That diner scene did happen — Gary did meet a woman that wanted to kill her boyfriend, and Gary let her off.”

In the film, it’s Madison’s request which pulls Gary down a darker path, as he crosses lines he’d never crossed before while in the persona of “Ron” (a far cooler character than Gary). “That was sort of the key into the movie for Rick and Glen, as I’ve heard them speak about it,” Arjona says. “Glen had read [the article], called Rick, and Rick was like, ‘Yeah, I read it years ago, but I didn’t have the key into the story.’ Their two brains work so beautifully, and I’m so happy it worked — because I wouldn’t be here if that key didn’t have clicked.”

It wasn’t just Powell and Linklater’s brains that were involved in creating Hit Man, though — while the director and star co-wrote the script, Linklater once again brought an exceptionally collaborative process to his work.