‘American Sniper’ Writer Jason Hall On Salvaging Truth From Tragedy | Deadline: DEADLINE: That rewritten script got a commitment from Steven Spielberg, who developed it and then left. He brings a different sensibility than Clint Eastwood, it was evident in Munich. How different was the movie Spielberg wanted to make? Is that a question you can answer? HALL: Yeah, I’ll try not to get myself in trouble here. I worked on the script quite a bit with Steven, for two months. His interest was in trying to paint a really complex and full picture of that war, trying to contextualize not only our place but also that of the enemy. I’d found the story of the enemy sniper, Mustafa, that Chris is up against. It was a true story and a beautiful sort of doppelganger, a mirror for Chris’ character. Steven really wanted to bring that out. I thought it was very intelligent. In my mind, I’d written this character as someone who was a lot like Chris. He was the hero for his own side, the legend over there who suffered the same ills over the course of this war. He felt the same emotional turmoil, fatigue and stress that Chris did. Steven was really interested in that. clintDEADLINE: That wasn’t in the film Clint Eastwood shot. HALL: What Clint does so beautifully is he presents this picture that’s so realistic. It’s life with imperfections; it’s spare and brutal. He’s interested in the man. He’s interested in the hero, his desires and wills, and he’s also interested in the frailties. That war was an ugly war and Clint didn’t try to beautify it, didn’t try to make it look like anything that it wasn’t. He didn’t try to make it look cinematic. He didn’t try to make it look more appealing to a moviegoing audience. That’s not his concern. His concern is realism, and truth. He is a man who trusts his instincts. You hear he does one take and moves on, but you don’t understand. He knows the truth and has been doing this so long and his instinct for truth is so sharp that he brings it out in everybody else, from his crew to his actors. He did a lot more takes on this movie than usual. He stepped into this thing and was so in the moment. He doesn’t push you into anything. He doesn’t manipulate the audience in any way. The movie is entirely unsentimental because he’s not trying to tell you what to feel. How many times do you go to a movie and it’s like, what are we telling the audience to feel? You can look at this movie and think, “Oh, this is patriotic propaganda — yee-ha, war hero, here we go USA!” But it’s like so much more important than USA. There’s a song that was made and it was like “yee-ha USA,” but you listen to it and you get into it and you realize, “Oh man, this is so much more than that. This is totally different. This is saying something about a war that’s really complex and about what we ask these guys to sacrifice.” I think any war told realistically is an anti-war movie. How can it not be? At the same time, I think Scorsese said that at the same time it glamorizes it because this is where heroes are made. I really wanted to show that war is human. We show the sacrifice and we show the cost, and if we can understand that in a base place in our body, and we can feel that, then maybe we’ll be less inclined to jump into another war.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 07:32:05 +0000