Director Xavier Gens and Timothy Olyphant on the set of Hitman Eric Caro/Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

At 32, French director Xavier Gens has worked on sets for over ten years, doing every job imaginable from driver to unit production trainee to storyboard artist. After a few stints as a trainee assistant director, Gens took on directing in 2000. But it wasn't until studio execs saw footage from his super violent neo-Nazi cannibal flick Frontier(s) that he was tapped to helm the first film from the Hitman videogame franchise.

You're a big gamer so you'd be a natural fit for this film. What brought you into the project?
I think that it was my first feature film that brought me inside the project, a very graphic movie, Frontier(s), which [will be] released just after Hitman. And when folks saw that they asked me to do the movie. They asked me first if I am a gamer. But [on this film] I had a chance to be a geek.

But you are also a complete cinephile as well. With this kind of genre, one can think of so many films that could have influenced you. Where you thinking about or referencing other films?
I think it is more genetic because I [consumed] a lot of movies when I was young like Jean-Pierre Melville's movies. One of the great references for the character Agent 47 was Le Samourai, one of Jean-Pierre Melville's first movies. And I asked Timothy to look at that movie because for me that was a great influence. It is the movie that influenced John Woo's The Killers. And also in my mind I had the influence of A Bittersweet Life [by director Ji-woon Kim], a Korean movie with a lot of graphic elements and very close to the video game. It is about another hitman who searches for somebody. It is a very interesting movie. Once I had seen this movie and once I had read the script, I said: "Oh, we can really [draw upon] the influence of Korean and Hong Kong movies" because I had already worked with Ringo Lam as training assistant director on Maximum Risk.

A number of actors were up for the role of Agent 47, including, at one point, Vin Diesel. What made you decide on Timothy?
I think Timothy is a really interesting actor to play Agent 47 because he has two faces: a very dark face and a very emotional face. And with him we worked a lot to have a very dark character at the beginning of the movie and feel [his] evolution [with] his relationship with Nika.

Nika is the emotional core of the film. What was it about Olga that made her right for the part?
It was very interesting because we [spent] such a long time [looking] for that character. We saw something like 200 actresses to play the character. When I saw Olga — really at the end of the casting just four days before the shoot — I made the [screen] test with her [and thought] She is great. It is exactly her. She is Ukranian. She is so beautiful. She is Nika and we have to get her in the movie.

The scene where you blow up the cathedral dome with an attack helicopter must have been complicated to shoot. Was it the most difficult to shoot?
It was not that difficult. For me the most difficult is to work emotions into an intimacy scene. It is more difficult than the big action scene. For the action scene where the helicopter shoots at the cathedral, it is just a shot of a helicopter in a field, and afterwards we made a composite of the helicopter on the cathedral. You just play with CGI effects on it. That is a little bit easy, but when you have to feel emotion between two characters that is more difficult, because it has to come from the actors.

It's been implied, but are we going to see a Hitman 2?
I am sure there is word. It depends on the success of this one.