This is a transcript of the Final Draft Insider View, a podcast that takes you inside the screenwriting industry to talk with screenwriters, television writers, executives, and industry influencers. To listen to the podcast click here. To listen to other podcasts visit podcasts.finaldraft.com.
Pete D’Alessandro: You are listening to the Final Draft Insider View. I'm your host, Pete D’Alessandro, and today we're interviewing a screenwriter that has written stuff like Paranoia, Spread, and the movie you probably know him from that you've probably already seen unless you're one of a very select few, is American Sniper. Jason Hall. Thank you so much for being here.
Jason Dean Hall: Hey, thanks for having me.
Pete D’Alessandro: One of the things I thought was most important to talk about was how you got inspired to get into writing because I think your journey is a little different than most people’s.
Jason Dean Hall: Yeah, it probably is. I started writing…I was an actor and I wasn’t getting the kind of roles I wanted, I wasn’t getting the auditions I wanted, so I would read these bad scripts that were just terrible and I couldn't get an audition for them, so I figured I could at least write a script that was that bad. And so I gave a stab at my version of a bad script and I spent enough time on it to make it not as bad as some of the others and got lucky.
Pete D’Alessandro: What was that script?
Jason Dean Hall: Oh, it was called The Iceman, kind of based on some events that had occurred to me at a prep school that I attended when I was 14, 15.
Pete D’Alessandro: Were you into writing back then?
Jason Dean Hall: No. You know, I could always write. I always managed to get myself into schools that I probably shouldn't have gotten into with my grades with some kind of fantastic off-the-wall essay or entrance poem or, you know, I wrote a fairytale to get into Exeter and I think that’s what got me in there, and I wrote a very long poem to get into college. So I had an imagination, certainly. I don’t…I never put enough time in it to be a writer per se but I could string a few words together here and there.
Pete D’Alessandro: So what got you into acting?
Jason Dean Hall: You know, I'm not sure. I directed a play in my first year of college and I did The Zoo Story, and I was just fascinated by the depth of insanity of one of the characters in that play, kind of inspired me. There was an actor who was cast who was just terrific at it and his work in that play made me feel like I wanted to dive into characters like that and to live with a different voice and a different set of objectives and motives and ideas that were my own.
Pete D’Alessandro: That’s interesting. So, I mean, acting you were inspired by something very positive, whereas the writing, inspired by something rather negative.
Jason Dean Hall: [Laughs] That’s a good point. I'd never thought of it that way. I think…you know, I think after the first…I wrote the first script and I got a deal to act in it and, you know, I sold it, I made a little bit of money, and so thereafter I was inspired by the positive rather than the negative. But it takes what it takes.
Pete D’Alessandro: Now, how did that work? I mean, when you were writing that first script, how did you structure that to get yourself a part in that?
Jason Dean Hall: Well, you know, I had a couple of people that wanted it and was lucky enough to be able to stick to my guns and…or unlucky enough to stick to my guns – I might have had a career a lot sooner if I'd been a little bit more malleable. But I was pretty determined to act in it and to have my way and I was willing to shun off anybody that didn't give it to me.
Pete D’Alessandro: So I'm curious how you first connected with the Chris Kyle story and his autobiography and got involved with this.
Jason Dean Hall: I went down…I heard about Chris in 2010, early 2010, and I heard about his feats in Iraq and the 2100-yard shot he had taken that was over a mile and that he had become the most lethal sniper in US history. And I had never heard of him, so I called a buddy of mine who was a former SEAL 6 operator and was working with the CIA and I said, “Hey, this guy Chris Kyle hit a 2100-yard shot and he's supposedly this really profound and prolific sniper over in Iraq,” and the guy, “Well, he's full of it,” like he didn't hit that shot.
Pete D’Alessandro: Well, why did he say that there's no way?
Jason Dean Hall: Well, he just said off the bat, he said, “There's no way. There's five guys on the planet who can hit that shot and your guy’s not one of them.” I said, “Oh, alright,” kind of deflated the story went away. I said, “Well, check him out, see if you can find out anything about him,” and he said, “Alright, I'll check him out, but he's full of it.” And I said, “Okay.”
So he called me back a week later and he's like, “So, your guy’s one of the five.” I was like, “Oh, alright. So there's something here.” And I arranged to go down and to meet Chris. We had an in with someone who was working to raise funds to help Chris start a tactical training company that he wanted to get off the ground. I got myself an invitation, went down to Texas to meet the man.
And to answer my own questions, you know, I wasn’t sure if there was a story. There was no book at that time and I didn't…frankly I didn't know what the story was. And I met Chris and looked into his eyes, and the question you walk in with when you hear someone’s taken that much life, hero or not, the fact that they’ve been asked or tasked with taking lives like that in such a horrific and profound number, is, what are they like? What happened? Did it change them? And I was looking at a man who it took something from, took something profound from him. There was a level of torment there that I guess, expected or unexpected, it was visceral and it was dark and it was hard to look at.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, hard to look at for you.
Jason Dean Hall: Hard to look at for me, yeah. I stepped away and, you know, he would smile over and he was hanging around. There was company there. I wasn’t the only guy in the room with him. There was like 50 cops that were there that were hunting and fishing and they were entertaining them, trying to get their business, and he could wrap a smile around it but it was…you could feel that this war took something from this man. And I called my wife and I said, “I don't know if there's a story here and I just want to come home.” And she was like, “Wow. Well, stick it out and see what happens because you're not going to fly it out tonight.”
And the next morning his wife and his kids walked in and I saw a difference in him. I saw something flash across his face that I just hadn't…I hadn't seen that the day before. It kind of gave me a clue that this guy had been somebody else before. It was a softer look in his eye. And you know, he struggled down to his knees just to get to his knees. It was hard for him. He looked like a 65-year-old man; he was 37.
And I met his wife and was standing there looking at her, watching him embrace his kids, and I realized that she had raised these kids virtually on her own and this was her war as much as it was his. She had gone through every moment of that…those four deployments and all the training in between, and they had conducted the majority of that relationship on a satphone. And in that struggle, in this marriage that seemed to be reeling from a near decade of war, I saw a film.
Pete D’Alessandro: How long had he been back in the US at that point when you first met him?
Jason Dean Hall: Less than a year. I found out that weekend that he had…he'd met a guy, was friends of friends, and they'd met in a…I think they were drinking in a bar and he'd told a few stories to this guy. And the guy was a lawyer and he said, “Hey, we should record this. Maybe we'll put it down and write a book.” So the guy brought a tape recorder, put it on the bar and let Chris tell stories. Chris would rant off these stories and he was…at that point, he was just six months back from the war, so this had happened before I met him. And he rattled off those stories and that became the book.
And in it, what you get is you get a glimpse of this man who was just still at war in almost every way possible except for location. He was in San Diego at that point but he was still talking like a man at war, and you get a vivid picture of the…you know, what is asked of these guys and what it does to them and what it leaves them with, which is just an unapologetic bravado that’s in many ways a cover for the destruction and diminishment of everything that they once held dear. These guys come home oftentimes with a moral injury that war challenges and tests every belief and value that you ever, ever held close. They all fly into the woodchipper the moment you step into war and these guys come home with a real soul sickness that challenges them to regain their footing, and it takes a long time for the lucky ones who are ever able to do that.
Pete D’Alessandro: Now, you talked about, you know, in some of the interviews I read, you talked about getting him to open up, but I'm curious about, you know, once you had kind of broken through and gotten to talk to him, what were your conversations like? How did you conduct that to get those stories out of him?
Jason Dean Hall: Well, it wasn’t easy. You know, in that first weekend, I had to wrestle a cop who was giving me a hard time. Chris wasn’t talking to me and his friend was giving me a hard time and, you know, I don’t drink, and so that didn't help my cause any. I ended up having to wrestle somebody later, too. One of his SEALs gave me a hard time after Chris’ death and, you know, I showed up at his funeral. I was invited to his funeral but, you know, I was trying to learn about him from his friends and it's a hard rank to break into when you're not a part of that brotherhood.
So with Chris, it took a lot of patience and it took a lot of trying and it took a lot of getting turned away or ignored at times, but over the course of the next two-and-a-half years we struck a relationship and I discovered his sense of humor. And I also watched this man start to thaw, and in thawing and in sort of finding his way home, he opened up and he started talking about things he wasn’t willing to talk about prior, about some of the sacrifice and the toll it took on his marriage and the struggle to find his way back after the war, which was pretty profound.
But still, I learned a lot more about the man from his wife than I did from him. I learned quite a bit about war and the tactical stuff, and he opened up about the enemy sniper that he alluded to on his book and went into detail of why he didn't write more about him and what that was like to know that another guy was out there somewhere taking shots and a lot of war stories, but not a tremendous amount was revealed to me about the turmoil that you sense in that book that never…it's never addressed in the book. And he kind of walks up to it a time or two, but it's between every line of that book.
It's just a tremendous amount of hurt and turmoil and it was a challenge to get that out of Chris, but towards the end while I was writing the script and I was talking to him nearly every day, he started to open up about what it was like to take the life of that kid that you see in the beginning of the movie. That was changed for the book in the rewrites when they were trying to get clearance from the Department of Defense, but the way it's depicted in the movie is what actually happened. And that stayed with him. That moment really stayed with him. He made the right call, but doing the right thing sometimes requires you to do the wrong thing when you're talking about character and values, and we teach these guys how to do something that is not natural for mankind. It's not natural for humans to take another life. And even in the course of war before Vietnam, there was nonfiring rates upwards of 85%, meaning soldiers when tasked with taking another life with a direct immediate shot would not fire their weapon, and that was 87, 88. The World War I was above 90% would not fire their weapon.
And so we'd learn how to change that by turning around targets into human-shaped targets and by shouting “kill” every time they hit a shot and doing things that make it more natural and mute the natural human instinct to preserve life and reverse that into something else where it becomes easier to take a life, and then we went off to Vietnam and a lot of those guys killed. And I think the nonfiring rate dropped to like 14% in Vietnam, and we saw the result of that of these guys coming home with this soul sickness.
That’s what I experienced with Chris and he opened up a bit about that. And I told him I was turning in the first draft of the script and he said, “I hope you work again,” and I sent it in the next day and the following day was Saturday, February 1st of 2013, I'm sorry, February 2nd, 2013, and that day I got a call that he had just been murdered.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, I'm sorry. My condolences as you going through that and getting close to someone, that’s really terrible.
Jason Dean Hall: For me it was what it was and it hurt and obviously I experienced the emotional toll, but it was also knowing the family and these kids and that they were going to be raised without their father was, as a parent, as a father myself to kids that were a couple of years behind his, it was just devastating. And as a husband knowing what a wife goes through to raise those kids and knowing what they went through, waiting and waiting and waiting and fighting to get her husband home and feeling him slipping through her fingers, going back to war four times and then finally to have him safe on American, soil only to watch him be struck down was just an impossible tragedy.
Pete D’Alessandro: I can't imagine.
Jason Dean Hall: Yeah, neither can I.
Pete D’Alessandro: As the writer, I mean, what do you do at that point? Did you have to back off? Did you have to take some time, sit with that for a while?
Jason Dean Hall: Yeah. You know, the funeral was the next week and I got invited to the funeral, and I went down there to Texas and reacquainted myself with her. She was obviously surrounded by close friends and I didn't…I made sure not to put the story in front of everything that was happening and the people and their grief and I treaded lightly down there, but I told her that I was there to speak any time…if she ever felt willing and, you know. I kind of put it…I put the ball in her court.
And we felt that it was important to go on because of the nature of the relationship and the way that he was struck down helping other soldiers and doing something that was so positive, and the irony of the fact that he was struck down by a man who was also suffering. And more of that will be revealed in the weeks in this trial, but I gave her my number and I tried to gleam as much as I could from every Navy SEAL that was there and I shot a bunch of footage on my iPhone and I came away with what I could. And she ended up calling five, seven days later and said, “Listen, if you're going to do this, you need to do it right because this is how my children are going to remember their dad.”
So I got this, you know, I took on this huge responsibility that became over the course of time a privilege, but in the moment it felt like a huge burden. But I was fortunate enough to know a little bit about grief and I told her I didn't know what she was going through, but I opened the door for her to tell me and she stepped through it, and she was supremely brave in opening up to me and taking me on this journey of revelation and discovery of this tragic beautiful love affair that she had with this man. And we walked through it together and in doing so I think she felt useful and she felt like she was doing something positive rather than sitting on the couch and crying. And in revealing him and their love affair to me she was also…she was grieving and doing it in a positive way, so it was more than research. It was a life experience and I'm profoundly grateful to her for trusting me with that.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, that’s a really unusual way to be able to handle that and it's great that she could get that story out. What were the enlightening facts or the enlightening perspectives that you got out of talking to her at that point?
Jason Dean Hall: Well, you know, our wives know us better than we know ourselves ultimately, so if you want to know something about a man don’t ask him, ask his wife. That’s what I figured out pretty quickly, because as you know, we all have a masculine…feminine side of our psyche and she revealed that side. She revealed the healing. She revealed the tenderness of this man before he ever went to war and the bigheartedness and how caring he was and thoughtful. And he was the one who was the bighearted one in the beginning of this relationship, and she was in many ways broke and he walked her out of the darkness of some abusive relationship and some depression and pulled her into the light, and she was then standing there for him when he went off and stepped into the shadows for us.
I learned the measure of his sacrifice because without knowing who he was before the war, then the sacrifice is meaningless. If he didn't change, if war didn't change him, then what was his sacrifice? It was his time, it was his blood, sweat and tears and relationships, but this war took something dear from this man, you know? It shaved off a piece of his humanity as it does many men, and she revealed the story of how he became hardened by it and calloused and how he changed and how it changed their relationship and how hard it was when he got back and how much turmoil they went through as a couple of and how their marriage struggled and they almost didn't make it many times, you know, and then how he finally found his way back helping these other guys. And I had known. He told he was helping a few vets and he'd tell me a funny story or two, but I didn't know the level to which that was really helping him and how he was healing through helping others and how his service had given him a renewed sense of purpose.
And that’s what these guys struggle with when they come home. They struggle finding a sense of purpose. Nothing that they do is going to feel as important or as extraordinary as what they’ve done over there in helping their guys stay alive, and the relationships that they find here don’t have the same bond, they don’t have the same weight as the relationships they had there. Their identity with the uniform and the purpose is stripped from them and, yeah, they're stripped of their friends and sent off on their own. And many of them struggle to find jobs and lots of them struggle to find a home and a place to live. And above all, they struggle to find a sense of purpose that matches anything like what they felt in the military, and so he had found that in helping these other guys.
And funny enough, the book enabled that. The book got his name out there so he could walk into any VA, and everybody knew who the legend was and so they'd let him take them out hunting and fishing, and these guys opened up to him and they stand around the bed of a pickup and talk about the war in a way in which they wouldn't talk about it with anybody else.
They don’t talk about that with their…your friends, your neighbors, your brother or your wife, but you'll talk about it with a soldier, and Chris had a real knack for it and a real ease with these guys. He approached them and they felt comfortable with him. He helped a lot of guys that way.
Pete D’Alessandro: Now, one of the things that…I mean, I know this, anytime you tell a true story or a story about someone who has been alive especially recently there's always going to be some controversy, but I saw you had a great quote in Rolling Stone where you said, “The point of art is to promote discussion.”
So, I mean, aside from the success, aside from the critical acclaim the movie has gotten, do you feel like you've achieved that? Do you feel satisfied that this has started some discussions?
Jason Dean Hall: I do, you know. It's to inspire, it's to reveal ourselves, it's to enlighten, and it's discovery and to inspire discussion. If we stand in front of a Jackson Pollock, we're going to have a different opinion of what we see, and that’s what we're able to do with this movie. We explore the archetype of a warrior. And Chris was all about helping other guys and he was humble in a way that I don't think his book would lead you to believe, but this man was a humble guy who felt like other soldiers’ stories needed to be heard, and I felt he was right and that his story encapsulated the archetype of a warrior and if we explored that with a singular sense of purpose that that story would become universal in a way. And it has inspired discussion in a way that is beyond anything I could have hoped for.
We had the privilege of doing an interview the other day with the new secretary of the VA who said, “Listen, this movie has done more in a few weeks for inspiring the discussion about our returning vets than we've been able to do in the last decade.” To be able to hear something like that, it's so special because these guys come home and they're so shut in with it and they're so quiet, and as a society we don’t welcome these guys home in the way that we should. And frankly, we don't know how to. It's uncomfortable.
I mean, it's uncomfortable for me still and I've been doing it for a couple of years now with this and then with another piece. And it's hard to ask a guy what it was like over there because you're opening it up not only for him, but you have to be ready to do that and you have to be willing to take on the answer, because the reality is when we say “thank you for your service” to a lot of these guys, what they say…and that shuts down the conversation. If you're honest, “thank you for your service” shuts it down. It's like, “Thank you for your service, I don’t want to hear much more, but I know that’s the right thing to say.”
The right thing to say is, “Hey, I appreciate what you did over there, you know? If you want to talk about it, I'm here. How was it? What was it like? Tell me what it was like. I have no idea how that must have been for you to go through that.” And if you do that, you're going to find that these guys will sometimes share their story with you. Because when we say “thank you for your service,” they're like, “You wouldn't thank me if you knew what I was forced to do over there,” because it's often ugly and it's a messy thing. And so to have these guys…to see Chris’ story and say, “If Chris Kyle the Legend could go ask for help and wasn’t feeling okay, maybe it's time for me to admit that I don’t feel okay either and ask for a little bit of help,” and to have that open up discussion in whatever way it has is just such a gift.
Pete D’Alessandro: That’s great. I think it's probably a good place to wrap us up, but I'd like to ask before we go, one, what are you working on next?
Jason Dean Hall: I'm doing a film strictly about PTSD and coming home with Mr. Spielberg called Thank You for Your Service. I'm also doing a film for Warner and Leo DiCaprio called Rasputin, which is about Rasputin, and I'm doing a film called American Drug Lord about the only American-born citizen to ever run a Mexican cartel.
Pete D’Alessandro: So you're juggling three movies in development right now. Wow.
Jason Dean Hall: Yeah. The first two have a script already and I have some notes to do on that, and the third will be a script to write in the coming weeks here.
Pete D’Alessandro: So the last place I want to leave it, if you have one piece of writing advice for people especially in talking about and looking at other people’s lives and adapting people’s lives, what would that piece of advice be for other writers?
Jason Dean Hall: My piece of advice for other writers is to explore their truth and also to explore yours because as artists, if we don’t share our truth in the work, then we're not artists, we're journalists. And I think filmmaking is an art form. You have to understand what they went through and you have to share your own truth from where you see that, and I think that’s important to remember in this sort of fact-based society. And criticism that we fall into is that we're storytellers and our job is not to be journalists and to dictate exactly what happened, because exactly what happened, for me, is not often that interesting. But to tell a story and to enlighten and illuminate through that story, that’s an art.
Pete D’Alessandro: Jason, thank you so much for joining us. This has been great.
Jason Dean Hall: Yeah, my pleasure.
Pete D’Alessandro: And if you're listening out there, if you like this podcast, please let us know by leaving a review or leaving a rating on iTunes or wherever you're getting podcasts and tuning in again. Thanks so much.
Jason Dean Hall: Alright, thank you.
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