Interview: Jason Hall

Just like a lot of actors, Jason Hall came to Hollywood to be an actor. He appeared on TV’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer as Devon MacLeish. He went on to appear in other shows. In 2009 Hall wrote a screenplay, Spread starring Ashton Kutcher. In 2010 Hall heard about America’s most lethal sniper, Chris Kyle, inspiring his latest screenplay, American Sniper.
Jazz Tangcay sat down with Hall in the very cafe where he would spend hours writing the script. Hall talks about how he went from playing the bad guy on TV to writing the script, meeting Chris Kyle and working with Director, Clint Eastwood.

Awards Daily: I remember when you appeared in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. How did you go from Buffy to American Sniper?

Jason Hall: (Laughs) I think they had me back on Buffy so many times because I was good at lip synching. I had gone to cinema school, so I got out and tried to produce stuff. I got into acting and thought, “Oh, this is fun.” I pursued it and saw it as a craft. After a while, I started to write things for myself to act in. I wrote my first script, and got good advice from my friend who said, “Don’t write three good scripts in a year, write one great script.” So, I took a year and a half to write my best version of a great script which I look back on which wasn’t that great. I sold it, and I did that again, got John Dahl attached and then something else happened. Every time people would come to me and say, “We know you want to do this, but what if Milos Foreman wants to direct it?” I said, “Milos can go F*** himself.” John Dahl would come to me and say, “Matt Damon is interested.” I’d be like, Matt Damon can go f*** himself. Then I wrote another one, and they were like, “What if Ashton Kutcher?” and I said, “Ashton Kutcher? Great idea. Go . Take it.” After that, everything got easier, I started writing for other people. I found that being a writer was far more satisfying than acting. I could be disciplined, create something on my computer, and I always loved writing, so it was kinda natural.

AD: What made you want to tell Chris Kyle’s story?

JH: I heard about Chris in 2010, that he was the most lethal sniper and I heard had hit that shot from over a mile. Having come from that background having had family members and the toil of war, I was curious about him and what it cost him. I was curious to know how it had changed him as a man to do something like that. You hear those numbers, and it’s both impressive and horrific, and I was just curious to know how it affected him as a man.

Also, is it true? I called this guy from the CIA and asked if it was true, he said, “There are five guys on the planet who can hit this shot and he’s not one of them.” Later, he calls back and tells me, “He’s one of the five. Everything they say about him is true. If there’s a name that came out of Iraq, it’s his.”

AD: You met Chris Kyle?

JH: I went down to meet him in 2010, right after Thanksgiving. It was a really intimidating room to walk into. I’d never been to Texas before, and there’s all these cops there and Chris. I shook his hands, and looked in his eyes, and you could see the turmoil. It was nine months out of the war, you could feel it on him. It was sad, and it was dark. It felt like he was still at war.

He did something, or something was done to him. I called my wife, and told her I was going to come home early, she asked why. I told her, I think it really messed him up. I don’t know what that story is. My wife, told me to stick it out and see if you can get him to talk.

He was nice, but he wasn’t chatty. The next day his wife and kids arrive. I saw him get down on his knees to embrace his kids, and his knees were messed up. You could see in his body, that he was worn down, and he was only 37-years-old. He took out his arms to his kids, and there was a flicker of light. I was like “Holy shit! There’s another guy here.”

Of course, I’m hanging out with him and this bunch of cops, so you get that side of him, that rough side, you see that he’s rough around edges and the turmoil. Then you see the softer side, and I saw something come out of him, and was like, Wow, this guy was someone else before this.

This guy had been at war and training for the better part of ten years. I realized that this lady, his wife, had raised the kids by herself. She did it by herself. She was changing diapers while he was off fighting this war. That war at home, was equally important to what he did. The struggle that they went through, that to me felt like a movie.

AD: What was his reaction to you wanting to write his story?

JH: He was like, “Ah, man why do you want to tell my story, you’re not going to do this. There’s a lot of better stories.” He brushed it off. He just didn’t tell stories about himself. I asked his friends, “Why doesn’t this guy talk?” and they told me, “He’s a sniper, he just sits and waits.” He just didn’t talk. It was hard to get through to him. He was very humble about it and didn’t like the attention.

As I’m walking out, he tells me about the book. Someone else wanted to write a book about him. He had planned to write his own story so I can give my guys credit and money. So, he ended up giving the money he made from the book to the two guys who you see die in the movie.

The book was printed, nobody wanted the book. It circulated around Hollywood and everyone didn’t know what to do with it. It – that version – was told by that guy, the guy who was home for nine months, with a beer, sitting across the room from me. I knew there was another side to this guy. I’d seen him with his wife and kids. We watched The Incredibles or something. I’d seen him go hunting with his boy. I knew there was another side to him, but I couldn’t quite get it from him. I understood him, I got to see him laugh.

I turned in the script, a first draft, and he joked, “Good luck on ever working again.” I turned the script in on Friday, the next day, I got a calling saying he was just murdered. I cried like a baby. I had spent all this time getting to know this guy, and the last several months, sitting here, listening to the worst music, trying to figure out what his turmoil was. Trying to figure out what that experience of war and stress was like, and how hard it was to come home to your family.

I was writing for 14 hours a day, I was listening to this heavy metal music trying to recreate it. I had insomnia. The script was late. The baby had colic. I had no sleep. My wife was on the toilet getting sick while I was giving the kids a bath, and the baby was screaming. I started to physically snap. I was just like, “I want to die.” The stress, the prolonged stress of being shot at, and being in a war that’s all around you, where you don’t know who the bad guy is. My experience was enough for me to draw from and to give me a framework of stress and build his stress in layers like that. So, his experience of coming home is seen in the layers with the kid, and with the drill.

AD: How long did it take for you to write the script?

JH: The first script took about three and a half months. I turned it in on January 1, on January 2 he was murdered and you see some of his funeral at the end of the movie.

I re-acquainted myself with his wife and I realized that. I hadn’t been talking to his wife as much as I should have during that process, but she said to me at the funeral. She said, “He’d just stopped fighting and then this happened.” I didn’t understand what she meant. I told her to call me if she ever wanted to talk. She called seven days later, very stern, very upfront. “You’re going to do this. You’re going to get this right, because it’s going to play a part in how the kids remember their father.”

The script I turned in was a war movie. We started talking for 3-4 hours. I wanted to know everything, from the first kiss to the last. I wanted to know what he breathed like, what he smelled like. I told her to explain her story to me. We talked every day for about 2-3 months for about 3-4 hours, and after two weeks I realized this was more than just research. With me, she felt useful and that she was doing something to preserve her husband’s legacy.

We walked through this beautiful journey of grief together because previously I had gone to grief workshops where you learn about the stages of grief, how to talk to someone and I was the right person at the right time.

I also learnt if you want to learn something about a man, don’t ask the man, ask the wife. She took me through how he was a sweet, thoughtful person and how Chris pulled her out of a dark place in his life. She was depressed and she was in a dark place and he loved her until she could love herself. She in turn was able to love him back from the dark place that war had taken him. It really was this beautiful story that I was privileged to be a part of their story. I felt it was important to be hungry to listen and it was just beautiful.

AD: What did you learn from Chris Kyle?

JH: I learnt about Chris through his wife. The tenderness in which he found the beauty to express his love to his wife. It made me want to be a better husband.
What I learnt from Chris, is what I hope people take away from the movie and this isn’t a movie just about Chris. It’s a movie about the USA. We are Chris Kyle in a lot of ways, if you take a step back. We forged a country through violence, we built something, we want to protect it and we want to protect others. We’ve been on overwatch, we’ve been looking out from the roof, we’ve been looking out for the globe. We are the chief dog.

Like Chris, we’re paying the price on that wall. If you stay on that wall too long, you become a hunter.

AD: At what point did you learn Clint Eastwood was going to be involved?

JH: Bradley was supposed to work with Clint for something else. When Steven (Spielberg) came out. He called me one day, saying, “Guess who’s doing the movie?” I was so depressed after Steven dropped out, and then he told me it was Clint. I replied, “Wow!”

Strangely, before he died, Tea (Chris’s wife) and Chris were having pillow talk, and she was joking with him, asking him who would be his dream director if the movie ever got made, and he told her he wanted Clint Eastwood.

AD: What did you learn from working with Clint Eastwood?

Clint expresses so much visually. The economy of his imagery is fascinating. I learnt that about the power of instinct. He’s able to work at the rate he does because he trusts himself. He trusts his instincts on such a level that he knows when something is honest.

He’s able to illicit honesty in his actors, because he’s so present and he’s so into that moment. Clint’s there, he’s not stressed out, and you drop into that moment with him, or you get left behind.

The reason he’s able to do fewer takes, is because he illicits that honesty in his actors. It relaxes them and puts them in that moment. The actors didn’t do a lot of acting, everything was just so honest. Especially with Bradley, he will say, That was totally perfect, but we’re going to go in closer, and that’s exactly what it was. He also doesn’t try to press his opinion on you. He also doesn’t manipulate the audience, here’s what we want the audience thinking at this moment. He’s like, here’s the truth of this moment, the audience can find it in this frame, it’s probably further away than they’re used to and they can work for it and find it. Or they can let it pass. That’s what leaves it so open to interpretation. Which is interesting for me. He’s unsentimental. He’s not going to push it on you, if you don’t work for it, you’re not going to find it in a Clint Eastwood movie. You have to use your head and you have to search for it. It’s there, if you’re open to it, you’re going to find it. If not, you’re not going to find it. He’s not going to force it on you, there’s no manipulation.

AD: The first thing that struck me was the opening sequence in Fallujah, how did you come up with that?

JH: When I looked at it from outside of this war, from all the doubts, the irritation and the hesitation and the upset from this war. How do we make a movie about Iraq war? A war we feel is in some ways unjust? A war we didn’t want to be in? We have all these feelings about this war, how do I pull them into a character and his experience of that war that are so much more impactful than our experience ? My decisions and my judgment of that war are so much less than that one moment. So, here’s this one moment that this guy has that changes his life forever. Here’s this moment of this guy, who didn’t chose to be in this war, he chose to be a solider. Here’s this guy who’s going to take this shot that’s going to change his life forever, and I wanted to bring the audience into that moment to understand the moral dilemma that all these soldiers face. Every soldier that went to Iraq faced a moral dilemma at some point or another. The war was just as ambiguous for them, but they’re fighting for the guy to their left or their right. I wanted to cut back, inform the audience. Who’s this guy making the decision? and what’s it going to cost him. This is the way he was raised, here’s what we believe, here’s what we have to lose. You challenge them to not take the shot, here’s what we have to lose, either take the shot or you don’t. You win or lose the audience in that moment. If they’re not with Bradley and his performance or with Chris at that moment. If we made any mistake along the way, we lose our audience.

If not, and we push them through and they’re like, Wow, this movie got very real, we just lost a piece of ourselves in doing that work.

AD: What was the biggest challenge in shooting the film?

JH: What struck me about this movie, when I started to do this film, was this war felt so far away from us. It was. For the families of these guys, it was on the cellphone. Tea would get calls from her husband at any time of day or night, and they’d be talking and at any moment a gun fight would erupt. So, it became closer because of technology. To illustrate that in this movie was challenging. These women sit at home and they got a phone call. Here’s my husband, and he’s in Iraq. That’s the truth of this war.

We watched this movie with several Seal wives, and that’s their story of being on the phone with their husbands and a gun fight would erupt. The call from the rooftop in the movie, that absolutely happened. It was just so real life, and personal to these people. To make it honest, the truth of that moment was important to me than making it cinematic. The truth resonates for those families.

Soldiers have called me and told me they planned their wedding on a sat phone. The biggest challenge was telling the truth in a way that was cinematic and packing his life into two hours, and to give it a backbone.

He went four times and that to me is impressive. If you step back and you’re a writer, that’s like episodic, I can’t do that. Then I realized that the spine of the story, those pillars are so important and if i can create a strong enough theme of what his sacrifice is, and if I can create a strong enough backbone of a theme of the war, and this ongoing struggle with his doppelgänger.

AD: How did Bradley Cooper train for the role. Didn’t he put on 44 pounds for it?

JH: He had a trainer who followed him everywhere. He worked his ass off. The before and after pictures are crazy. He did the diet, he trained with this accent coach, and trained with Seal Snipers.

These families take so many videos, Tea took so much video, there’s some really profound moments where he felt like he knew he was going to die. I was like did he know? He’s reading this book, and he’s like, we have to finish this story, I want you to have this when I’m gone. He really believed he wouldn’t come back after tour four. Bradley captured the essence of who Chris was, he studied those videos. He captured more than just the way he looked.

There’s a sniffle, that Bradley does in the movie, and that’s Chris.

You get to the end of that movie and you see the photo of Chris and it’s like a check mark, where you’ve spent two hours with this guy.

The most profound moment for me was when Tea saw the movie a few weeks ago, she starts weeping and giving me a big hug saying, “I don’t know how he did it. He brought my husband back to life. You guys brought my husband back to life.”

This movie can go up, down, sideways, but for me, that was it. I wrote this movie for her and those kids. To hear her say that, that’s a testament to Bradley and his preparation, and to Clint and for telling the story in this honest way. For me, it’s Bradley’s best performance yet. He builds up this masculine guy, and starts chipping away at it, until he’s in pieces.

American Sniper opens on Christmas Day