It’s been quite a week for screenwriter Jason Hall, as he’s been nominated for both an Academy Award and a BAFTA for his latest project American Sniper. We had the pleasure of speaking to the man himself about spending time with his subject Chris Kyle, how closely he worked with Bradley Cooper, and we got his reaction on his BAFTA nomination (the interview took place prior to the Oscar nomination announcement).
He also tells us about what he’s got planned next, which happens to involve a certain Steven Spielberg – who he reveals was initially cast as the director of American Sniper before Clint Eastwood got on board. Oh, and this interview contains spoilers. Don’t say you weren’t warned…
How did you come to be aware of Chris Kyle’s story?
I heard about his story in 2010. I heard he was one of the longest shots in Iraq and the sniper who had the most confirmed kills in US military history. I thought that sounded pretty incredible so I did a little research and called a guy that I knew who was working for the CIA and I said, “hey, is this guy real? Did he do everything they say?”and he said, “Look, there are five guys who can make that shot at 2100 yards on the entire planet, and your guy is not one of them.” So I asked him to check it out and make sure, and he called back a week later and said, “so your guy is one of the five. I don’t know how you know who this guy is, but he did some stuff over there that was pretty incredible, and seems to always be in the right place at the right time to save a bunch of guys lives”. He had a lot of nicknames, like ‘right time right place’, they called him ‘midas’, and then they landed on ‘the legend’. So I managed to fly out to Texas to meet him and he was only 9 months out of the military at that point.
So what was that experience like, and how did that meeting with him inform the screenplay you were soon to write?
Well I didn’t know what to expect, I wondered what he was like and what sort of effect all this stuff had on him. I have some family in the military and I’ve heard some horror stories, but a lot of times you get half a story or a shrug of the shoulders, but I met Chris and shook his hand and it was immediately clear to me – there was a lot of turmoil in his eyes, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but it was unsettling. It seemed to me that he was still at war. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know if there was a story there or not, but I knew if there was one, it wasn’t quite over, because he didn’t seem like he was back. I called my wife and said, “I don’t know what to do with this, he seems like he’s still struggling and whatever happened over there really affected him,”, and she said, “well stick it out and see if there’s anything there”. So I did – and the next morning his wife and kids came to visit and though there was a hardness to him, and he had his armour on, when I saw him kneel down to welcome his kids, I saw a different side to him. For a moment I saw the father, I saw him soften and perhaps who he was before the war, and this other side to him was illuminated. His wife was standing there in the doorway, and I saw what they had been through for a moment. He had been at war for ten years and their marriage was reeling from it, and I saw this woman who had raised these two kids virtually on her own, and in that I saw there was a story here, it wasn’t just some hard-ass guy who went to a hard-ass war and came out a hard-ass – it was something that changed in this man and had been taken by him by this war, and it was that story I set out to tell.
In the film he does have this armour, a bullet proof vest that won’t let emotions slip through, and that’s essential because if you’re going to kill over 150 people, you need to have that to cope with it. But then was it quite tough to craft the character in a way that was relatable, and sympathetic, when we didn’t get to see much vulnerability in him?
I didn’t get to see a ton of emotion from Chris Kyle in my visit, and he wrote a book and you don’t get the soft side to him in that, either. You get the armour that was Chris Kyle at war, and I got to know him for two and a half years and we worked on the first draft together and I started to feel him softening, and I would ask those questions about what the war took from him and I would get some answers but I never got a real, complete answer. So I turned in the draft I was working on with him and the next day he was murdered. It changed everything, not only because the story of his life changed, but what happened was his wife, after the funeral, called me up and said, ‘if you’re gonna do this you have to do it right because this is how my kids are going to remember their father’. As we started to talk, probably close to 200 hours in two months, and what I got from here was the other side. Because these men do put on this psychological armour to go to war, to become somebody else, and that’s what Chris did, and what a lot of these guys do, and that’s honestly what the military trains them to do, to find a way to do a job that humans aren’t naturally inclined to do. We’re not naturally inclined to take a life. So you need to find a way to psychologically prepare the soldier to do that. So that’s a part of his story and the gentility of who this guy was. But his heart was revealed through his wife, the way he pulled her out of the darkness and then into the light when she was struggling in their early courting days. Also, how he found his way back in the three years he was home, which was a harder struggle than anything else was for him, because he had sacrificed a lot and he was drinking too much and he was suffering from the psychological effects these guys bring home. It wasn’t until about two months before he was murdered that she finally felt her husband had recovered and was home, spiritually and psychologically. So yeah, he became somebody else and that’s who you get in the book, you get that warrior mentality, that gruffness and the filthiness of war, and that’s why the book is so compelling, because he was fresh back.
Whenever you write a screenplay there is a degree of pressure and responsibility, but knowing that his wife will see this movie, and like she said, the memory his kids have of their father is going to be shaped by your film – must have made for a very delicate writing process?
Yeah it obviously did, but the thing that was also clear to me, was that this was not just a story about Chris. This is a story about every soldier who goes away and every soldier who makes thats sacrifice. These people put everything on the line, and it’s not just them that make sacrifices. Their family, their kids. So for that reason, you take the gloves, you have to tell how ugly it is over there and you tell how ugly it can be here. You hope we get a better understanding of this singular and personal sacrifice each soldier makes and how universal that is to every soldier who goes to war, for not only the United States, but every country around the globe. This torment is not unique to Chris Kyle. With this piece, because his murder happened in the middle of knowing him, and we had gotten to know him, everyone took care with it, and understood importance of telling this story, not only to his family, but to all soldiers. That was highlighted by the fact he was murdered by another soldier, another veteran. It shines a light on how big this problem is, and how big an issue we’re dealing with. Not only with our veterans, but with our community and our ability in understanding these guys and welcoming them home. It highlighted for me how good we are at training these guys to go out and kill, but how badly we’ve done in helping them come home and find any peace.
Do you think your film to bring light to that issue, and hopefully try and improve matters?
That would be my greatest ideal for this movie, that it starts a conversation that allows us to understand what they go through a little bit better so we can understand how hard it is to come home. What you get from those guys is that people just don’t get it. They say, ‘thank you for your service’ but in their head they’re thinking, ‘you wouldn’t thank me if you knew what I had to do. If you knew, you’d be disgusted by it. So don’t thank me for my service’. So it was important for me to tell what Chris Kyle had to do over there, and show the very moment that haunted him and make him question himself and what he was doing. You have to take the life of a kid like that, and it haunts you. It haunts you, and he understood the evil over there, but he had to turn it into something that was pure so he could continue to do what he needed to do.
In regards to the screenwriting process, when were you aware that Clint Eastwood was going to direct and that Bradley Cooper would be playing Chris? And how did that shape the way you devised your script?
We were lucky enough to get the rights to the book, because other people were kind of afraid of it because he sounded so unapologetic in it. Honestly, we weren’t sure about that either, but we pitched it and then I called up Bradley who I’ve known from years back and pitched him the story. We had both bonded once on a conversation over The Deer Hunter, which we’re both fond of. So he immediately responded to it, and asked ‘did it mess him up?’ and I said, ‘it certainly did’. I knew we were on the same page and we developed it closely together, and he was instrumental in some of the characterisation of who Chris was. But I never feel the obligation to write for the actor – it’s a true story, I feel the obligation to write the character as the character was. So I just tried to write Chris in Chris’ voice, and let Bradley figure out the rest. So when we finished the script, Steven Spielberg came on and we developed the script for about three months but then he left us for budgetary reasons. It was a hard day because we got really close with Steven and he walked off – and you think, how can you replace Spielberg? Then two months later Bradley called up and said, ‘you’re never going to guess who is directing this movie?’ and we’d always talked about this movie as a Western because it’s shot in the dirt. So when he said Clint Eastwood was coming on it was a dream come true, we couldn’t believe it. Clint made some changes and we had to cut the script down a little bit, and he’s a very musical filmmaker and finds a fluency to everything he does and is able to communicate so much with just a look or a glance.
By the way, huge congratulations on the BAFTA nomination – you must be thrilled with that. Are you coming over to London for the ceremony?
Thank you, and absolutely. I was so thrilled to wake up and find that out, it was honestly quite a surprise. I’ve never been to London, aside from the airport, so I’m really looking forward to it.
So finally what is next for you now? Any other projects in the pipeline?
I’m working on another film about soldiers called ‘Thank you for your Service” which deals strictly with people struggling to deal with coming home. That’s with Spielberg.
Must be a joy working with him.
Yeah, it’s been quite special.
American Sniper is out in cinemas now and you can read our review here.
