If you read this interview, we will have to kill you
With the film of the videogame Hitman hitting the DVD shelves this week, we wondered if any of it nore any resemblance to reality. And frankly we didn't know ... but we know a man who does. His name is Kris Hollington and he's Britain's leading “assassinologist”. Screenjabber's Neil Davey caught up with him for a chat.
“It is, admittedly, a word I made up,” explains Kris Hollington with a laugh. He's discussing his status as Britain's leading “assassinologist”and how a mild-mannered freelance writer became such an expert on killing people. “It was basically the result of a boozy lunch with a publisher,” he admits with a laugh. “I'd written one book and I met this publisher and we were discussing various possible subjects for the next one, and we started mentioning books and topics to do with assassination. Eventually we reached a point where we thought 'why don't we do a book on the whole assassination genre?'
“Most of the books out there were little more than encyclopaedias,” contuinues Kris, “and we thought we could do one that was far more analytical. From there on I became more and more engrossed in the subject.” This lead to a book — the cheerily named How To Kill: A Definiteive History of the Assassin — a website and, almost inevitably, some interesting attention from the sort of shady characters most of us would prefer to avoid. “I've been contacted through my website quite a lot by other people who are researching assassinations,” Kris explains, “which is very useful. But I've had some very odd meetings with people who've been involved, er, with the trade...”
Presumably you can't talk about those as you'd then have to kill us? Kris, admirably, laughs — even though he's undoubtedly heard the joke several million times before. For an expert on killing, he's remarkably upbeat... “I can tell you about one chap, a former KGB man I met who fled to the West when the Berlin Wall came down,” he admits. Did you meet on a park bench and discuss the weather or whether the wildebeest were running freely? Or was it over sushi in a little place in Piccadilly? “No,” laughs Kris. “I actually met him in the lobby of a famous London hotel underneath the picture of Winston Churchill, so it all got very cloak and dagger. He's a wanted man, apparently,just like Litvinenko, so there's quite a fear among Russian dissidents that they could go the same way. He told me some very interesting things about that...”
I wait — the classis journalist trick — but Kris won't be drawn. Possibly because he would then have to kill me. Instead, we turn to Hitman, the glossily silly, dumbly enjoyable DVD. Remarkably, Kris doesn't think bits of it are too far from reality. “The film is interesting. Yes, a lot of it is the video game, with blood and guns and a sexy woman who always seems to be in a state of undress, but what's interesting is the introduction. “That's where they show how they create the hitman and this is actually based on fact. As long ago as the 11th Century there was an Iranian sect called the Asashin. They were the first to kill for money, they trained to become killers.”
Not that training killers is as straightforward as Hollywood might have us believe. “When the CIA tried to train hitmen at the start of the Cold War, they had tremendous difficulties. People got through the training programme no problem, but once they were sent out into the field, they'd go out and come back and say they couldn't pull the trigger and murder someone in cold blood. “There's a tremendous psychological barrier — which I think is encouraging — that most of us find it hard to kill someone for no reason and there's a tremendous difficulty in getting around this. The best assassins are psychopaths but they, inherently,” laughs Kris, “are not trustworthy.”
So does that leave us with a Bourne-style approach with lots of sensory deprivation and torture and the like? “I did speak to someone in the security services who thought that Bourne was scarily accurate,” reveals Kris. “But I don't know if the CIA actually tried it but they did an awful lot of experiments, they called it the Ultra Programme.” Quite where Hitman will sit in the opinion polls on assassination films will become clear in years to come. In the meantime, Kris has no doubts which film is the most accurate. “One of my personal favourite films is The Day of the Jackal. Obviously a lot of that was based on reality, the attempted assassination of the French president, but that opening sequence is accurate, and grittily realistic.”
Kris laughs. “There is another crossover between real life and assassination,” he adds. “The guys who are alleged to have killed Litvinenko? They supposed to have gone on a Bond-style night on the town afterwards, with strip clubs and casinos and bars... but they left a trail of polonium wherever they went!”
• Hitman is out now on DVD. Kris Hollington's latest book is Line of Fire, the autobiography of Brian Paddick, former Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and London mayoral candidate is also available.