American Sniper - Review Thread

DEADLINE: So you are the producer who hits the lottery when Steven Spielberg commits to direct American Sniper. Then he drops out. Explain the steps that bring you to Clint Eastwood.

COOPER: The thing about it is, when Steven shows interest, all of a sudden other guys pop up if he leaves. It’s not like there’s a hex around the project. When he takes the time to develop the script, his throwaways, a lot of people want to pick up. That happened with Flags Of Our Fathers, which Steven could have directed, but wound up producing with Clint directing. I’d just re-watched Unforgiven, one of my favorite films, and Greg Silverman at Warner Bros calls me up and he says, ‘What about Clint?’ I said, Clint would be amazing, but isn’t he doing Jersey Boys? Silverman goes, yeah, but he’s reading American Sniper, for recreation, right now. I said, let me call him.

DEADLINE: Did you know him enough to do that?

COOPER: A little, yeah. At one point, I just put myself on tape for his movies, but I met him three times and talked on the phone when we were going to do this other movie, A Star Is Born, that I wound up being unable to do. So I hoped that meant I knew him well enough to call. I’m in Denmark editing Serena. Now, you don’t really persuade Clint to do anything, he’s either going to do it or he’s not. But I said, ‘Hey, Clint, how you doing?’ ‘Bradley, how are you?’ And he’s like [Cooper speaks in this spot-on impression of Eastwood], ‘Yeah, I’m reading this Chris Kyle thing, 10 or so pages at night in-between shooting, yeah, so I guess Steven’s not doing it, huh?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, and I have to say I just watched Unforgiven again, and there are a lot of similarities. I love the idea of treating this like a Western, and investigating this guy and his psyche.’ Clint goes, ‘Yeah, yeah, call me on Monday, let me take a look at the script.’ I said, OK, great, Clint, thank you.

DEADLINE: What happened on the next call?

COOPER: He says [in a hoarse whisper], ‘Yeah, let’s make this f*cker.’ And that was it. I was like, ‘OK, Clint.’

DEADLINE: Why do you think America has been embraced?

COOPER: You never know, it’s hard for me to say. But the one thing I can tell you is, in terms of talking about this as a producer, Jason Hall and I, once we got Clint on board, it became about making a plan. What’s great about Clint is, he shoots the white script. What I mean is, you have that script, and all the rewrites done on set are inserted in different colors. Clint shoots the white draft, the one the studio approves, and there’s no rewriting during the shoot. So we knew that we had to get it f*cking right the first time. That doesn’t mean that Clint isn’t open to improvisation, but that’s different. So, I found a regimen of how to gain the weight because I knew I had to look like Chris, and I had to get the accent right, and learn how to be proficient with the .338, the .300, and the MK-11 [sniper rifles]. Then, I would meet with Jason and we would talk about Chris and the more I got to know Chris through all this source material and going to his home in Midlothian, Texas, I realized I’d never seen a guy like this on film, ever. There wasn’t going to be this big breakdown scene like you always see, it just wasn’t going to happen. So, our emphasis was stripping down the script and making it real.

DEADLINE: Describe the influence of Clint Eastwood. So many actor-y moments in movies, and then you drive your vehicle in his garage, he gets under the hood and tosses everything that pimped the ride.

COOPER: That’s a good description for what we did. For example, the scene when he comes home from the fourth tour, and he’s sitting there in the bar when Taya calls? There was a version of that where he was in a motel. There’s a gun, there’s whiskey, there’s a Bible, he’s having nightmares with the drill [that a warlord uses on informants]. It’s all very cinematic, but it’s just…not this movie. What happens when you walk through the airport and you see those guys at the bar? I always think, what are they fu*king doing? Do you ever go in there in the bar for two hours in the airport waiting for your flight? Are they waiting for a flight? So, we talked about doing it actually in an airport bar, but it didn’t work out with location and everything. But forget the motel, forget that. No, he’s just in a bar sitting there. He’s just that guy you might see if you walk in a bar. All of a sudden he gets a phone call and you realize, ‘Oh, he’s in America. He hasn’t gone home yet.’ And it’s just, no bullsh*t, there’s no fu*king bullsh*t. It’s just real. Stuff like that, taking the scene that’s very cinematic, making it still very cinematic, but in a much more stripped-down Chris Kyle way.

That attitude informed the whole movie, it informed the script, it informed how I acted it, it informed how Clint directed it. And we thought, and this is a long way around to answering your question, that if we had all gotten that right, that’s what America would respond to. You watch the movie and you’re going, ‘Oh, this feels real.’ The hope is you’re not going like, ‘Wow, look at Bradley Cooper act.’ No, dude, in fact, you’re just going, look at this guy. You’re getting to know Chris Kyle, and because you believe it you then go, ‘Oh, f*ck, look at what these people go through.’ Stripping down the flowery way you can tell a war story, and just really trusting that this story is enough and the guy himself and Taya are compelling enough to carry a two-hour movie. There’s no score in the movie.

DEADLINE: Why?

COOPER: Having no score was huge. I mean, look at Fury. Look at a lot of war movies. Huge, massive scores. I don’t even know if there’s ever been a war movie without a score. Why no score? Because the minute you put music over those scenes it changes the whole thing. You’re aware it’s a movie.

DEADLINE: The music is a manipulation, telling you when and how to feel?

COOPER: That’s not needed. Well, everything’s manipulation. I wouldn’t say a score is that. But we figured out it was best to play it real and stripped down, which we worked into every facet of the movie, from the script, to the acting of it, to the filming of it, to the editing of it, and to the scoring of it which meant no score…there’s sound design, but even that’s very pared back. And we just kept stripping back in the post production process, just stripping, stripping, stripping.

DEADLINE: That included Kyle’s lack of emotional moments. He was a master deflector. Every time somebody pointed out something like his off-the-charts blood pressure, he’d change the subject. The tells were subtle, the ones revealed the psychological destruction of having to do things like shoot children who were being used by adults to suicide bomb approaching platoons. Jason Hall had said that when he first met Chris Kyle, he looked in his eyes and saw a man still at war. What was the strategy that made all this feel so genuine?

COOPER: You just said it. It’s in his eyes. There’s not a lot of trickery with the camera in this movie. A friend of mine put it best, it’s almost like Clint took a step back, but the camera is half a step behind Chris the whole movie which is a very ego-less thing to do for a director. Even me, as an actor, I took a step back from Chris. Because there’s this scale of his emotional expression. The normal person, would provide you a box this big to work in. Chris’s box was very small and I had to tell the story from within that box. So, as an actor you want to have that big moment when he’s f*cking crying, whatever it is. But there is no moment because that’s not the way the guy was.

DEADLINE: How do you respect those limitations and still show the tectonic plates that are subtly shifting below the surface as this warrior crumbles from within?

COOPER: It was all these little moments. We didn’t know when they were going to come. I didn’t know if the crack would come with the dog in the yard, or with the phone call at the bar, when he was talking to the psychiatrist, or when his buddy Marc Lee got killed. I didn’t know if it was going to come with his buddy Biggles in the hospital. Literally, I had no idea.

DEADLINE: The moment the crack did occur, when he sat in that bar unable to go home, you didn’t know beforehand that was it?

COOPER: No. You just do each scene and then that scene in the bar, that second scene, the reason why that became the crack is because I loved Chris so much. I still remember, it was the second take. There’s the camera just coming in, coming, coming, coming like that. And I remember on the phone I felt like, fuck, I was going to really lose it. I’m on the phone, and because of the way it was written I could hear the kids in the background. When we shot her side there were no kids, but the way I was playing it, I could hear the kids. And then the camera’s coming and I had the hat on and I kind of turned away, because I didn’t want the camera…

DEADLINE: You were embarrassed?

COOPER: Yeah, I was embarrassed, dude. It was so crazy. I was… protecting… Chris. It was so f*cked up, dude, but it worked. I remember I felt like I was going to squeeze my head with my hand, dude, and then I went like that and I was like just desperately trying to hide. And then it was over. And we thought, wow, that’s interesting. But it came out of me wanting to protect Chris.

DEADLINE: You didn’t consciously try to force other cathartic moments?

COOPER: Well, based on the research I did and Taya and other people that knew him, that’s the way Chris was. He never raised his voice once, she said. Never. You know, when they’re in the car after he gets his blood pressure taken and he goes, you fu*king hijacked me back there. He’s just talking, talking.

DEADLINE: Low simmer?

COOPER: Yeah, keeping it under control. Deflecting the attention off himself and asking about how you were. Especially with the guy in the garage. He hated the idea of being called a legend, f*cking hated it, dude, hated anybody asking about all of his kills. Look at any interview he did, he always deflected that.

DEADLINE: He’s not a fan of theatrics?

COOPER: It’s always about, what are we getting at here? There it is, there’s the f*cking mitochondria, this is the sh*t right here, that’s the powerhouse. So, we were on the same page, me and Clint, and that meant no fu*king frills, no bulls*it, let’s just tell a simple story. We knew that character was charismatic. The guy’s amazing. He’s fucking huge. He’s got this amazing voice. He’s got this levity about him. He has this way of thinking about the world that I’ve never seen on film, quite frankly. When the psychiatrist asks him about himself and how he’s doing, you’re not expecting that answer. I wasn’t. But that’s real to him and you’re looking in his eyes and thinking, what’s going on there? That’s interesting to us, that’s an interesting enough character to fill the frame. You don’t have to come up on a fu*king Brian De Palma thing or come overhead like…no, that’s it, right here.

DEADLINE: Or having the shrink comment that his eyes betray the fact he’s not right?

COOPER: Yeah, well, that’s just Jason Hall making it real, but we were all on the same page. Chris led the way.

DEADLINE: When Jason Hall first met Chris Kyle, he had to brawl with one of his buddies before Chris gave him the time of day. Even then, Jason said he didn’t crack the script until Chris was killed and his widow Taya, gave him a fully fleshed view of the man behind the warrior. What was your own entry point?

COOPER: I had just made a producing deal with Warner Brothers when Jason Hall called. My agent told me about the book and Jason sent it but I hadn’t read it. He pitched me the idea, this real guy with all these confirmed kills. By then, Warner Brothers had passed on it three times but he thought, you just got this deal, they want to make movies with you, what do you think? By the time he got there, I was thinking about how obsessed I was with this genre. The war picture genre. Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Coming Home, Thin Red Line, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now. I grew up with those movies and liked the idea of investigating the psyche of a man in that situation. While he told me about it, going back and forth about his view of Kyle, I thought what I also liked about this was it sounded like a Western to me. I got excited. I said we should pitch it differently than was done the last three times. We went to work on that. I thought, this was cool, never thinking that I would actually play Chris.

DEADLINE: You got a yes from Warner Bros without committing to play Kyle?

COOPER: Yeah. I love telling stories, and that’s how I looked at it. It’s not about me, my character and how I’m going to play it. It’s this guy who served four tours and each time he comes back, the bounty on him gets higher and higher trying to get this guy. He’s dealing with the home life, but there’s this thing that just keeps pulling him back into the frontier, toward the ultimate standoff. How amazing to frame that within a real conflict that has nothing to do with a Western but feels like one. The more I read his interviews online, the more complex and fascinating Chis Kyle became.

DEADLINE: Was Kyle as wary of you as he was Jason initially?

COOPER: I was working, we were editing Silver Linings Playbook and I was shooting Serena. After I got back and asked Jason how it was going, he tells me they’re still trying to make Chris’s deal, five months later. So I get on the phone with him, for the first time, and tell him I think we can make a sick movie here, and that he’d better get used to me because I’d be coming down there to Midlothian and spending a year with him because we are going to do this thing f*cking thing right, and that we’d get a great director. And he was like, ‘all right, man.’ He was doing a lot of work with vets by then and he’d done his research and knew I’d done USO tours. I thought it went great and Jason went away to write. And finally, Chris’s deal was done, Jason turned in the script and then Chris was murdered.

DEADLINE: Jason felt his first draft only reflected what he got from Chris Kyle, which wasn’t the movie we saw onscreen. What did you think when you read it?

COOPER: I agree with that scenario. I thought we were going to have to do a lot of work. But it was a good first draft, it gave us the sandbox.

DEADLINE: Too much war hero and not enough of the price paid?

COOPER: It wasn’t as much about that. It’s what a lot of first drafts are and Jason, I would say it if he was right here and he would be the first one to agree, it didn’t have a rhythm. It was hard to find the flow and weave a tapestry that has a through-line that included four tours, growing up bronco riding, and going home. I didn’t get a real sense of the guy either. It felt like it needed work, but to be honest, I had other things going on and it wasn’t my main focus.

DEADLINE: Then, he dies, murdered by a PTSD-suffering vet.

COOPER: Which was f*cking crazy and sad. Taya had the conversation with Jason about seven days later and said, if you’re going to do this, get it right. So he went back and we talked about it because we had to rethink the whole thing. It still felt like his story needed to be told. It’s just so crazy how he died. The irony is just insane.

DEADLINE: Never a thought of quitting?

COOPER: No, quite the opposite. But it wasn’t until Steven Spielberg called…that is the thing that started it. He’d read the revised version of the script, the one after Taya got involved.

DEADLINE: Describe that moment, when Spielberg says yes.

COOPER: Oh, I remember when I got the phone call, I was shooting American Hustle, and then he called me. They said Steven Spielberg is on the phone and I was like, what? They’re telling me I have to shoot a scene and I ask David O for a second. Steven says, ‘hey, Bradley, I read the script, I think it’s the best script I’ve read in a long time and I want to make American Sniper my next movie and I want to do it with you.’ I was like…okay.

DEADLINE: So that’s how you became the star?

COOPER: Yes. I get on the phone and call Warner Brothers. That’s when as a producer, that everything got out of the way and then I went bam. And that is when I became at the head of the ship with everybody in and from then on it was the f*cking main focus. So, the first thing was moving The Elephant Man, which I was going to do in New York that spring, and we’re talking to Evangeline Lilly and thinking about who could be Taya, and then working with Steven on the script, meetings, flying back and forth. And it was during awards seasons with Silver Linings, so it was like I remember just it was crazy trying to get this thing together. Then all of a sudden he dropped out.

DEADLINE: What’s it like, developing a script with Steven Spielberg?

COOPER: Well, it’s very similar to I think any collaborative endeavor with a very highly intelligent, highly creative mind which is thrilling, fu*king thrilling. You’ll be texting back and forth and you get on the phone about a scene, and I’ll suggest how the camera is coming down and he’ll say, no, what about this? And it’s like, f*ck. You’re Steven Spielberg, that’s f*cking brilliant and I never could have thought of that. And then, Steven dropped out.

DEADLINE: Great directors fall in and out of love with projects.

COOPER: I understand that, and that directing is a huge commitment. And that because of what we’d gone through, we got Clint.