Clint Eastwood Was Warned That He’d Face ‘Hell’ if He Did a Bad Job Directing ‘American Sniper’
Actor Clint Eastwood added another successful movie to his long filmography as a director by shooting American Sniper. The film’s reception was a good thing for Eastwood, who was warned about messing up the story.
Clint Eastwood was told hell would be unleashed on him if he messed up ‘American Sniper’
Eastwood’s American Sniper was loosely based on the memoir of the same name that was written by real-life military veteran Chris Kyle. The film saw Bradley Cooper playing an expert military sniper who has difficulty adjusting to normal life after returning home from war. In an interview with Impulse Gamer, Eastwood stated that he was already in the midst of reading the memoir on his downtime.
“And I was curious about the story and the guy. So, they called me about it, and I said, ‘Well, gee, let me finish the next 30 pages and I’ll call you back.’ It was interesting, ironic, a good story. So I said, ‘I’d love to see the script.’ We met them and Bradley called and said, ‘They’d like to have you do it.’ And that was the end of it,” Eastwood said.
But Eastwood was immediately warned about the feature by Chris Kyle’s father Martin Kyle. The elder Kyle didn’t mince words when speaking to the veteran filmmaker.
“Disrespect my son and I’ll unleash hell on you,” Kyle told Eastwood according to Daily Mail.
Still, the Oscar-winner managed to convince Kyle that he had nothing to worry about, and that his son’s story was in good hands.
“Both Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Cooper were men I could trust. They were very open and engaging and did not want to hide anything,” Kyle said.
Clint Eastwood felt that ‘American Sniper’ differed from his other war movies
Eastwood was familiar with doing movies similar to American Sniper. But he considered the 2014 film about the late veteran different from other films of its kind for a significant reason.
“I have done war stories before, but this was exciting to me because it was a cross between Chris’ exploits in combat and the personal aspects of his life, which made him even more interesting,” Eastwood once said in an interview with Emanuel Levy. “It shows the toll war takes on a person but also the pressure it puts on the whole family. It’s good to be reminded of what’s at stake when people are sent into war and to acknowledge the sacrifices they make, so I thought that made it an especially significant story to tell.”
The Alias star believed that Eastwood was the right fit for the movie due to Eastwood’s own history with character-driven pieces.
“In some ways, it’s a universal story about what most veterans have to go through—dealing with the seesaw of being in a war zone and then suddenly coming home to a ‘normal’ life. That was very moving to me,” Cooper said. “I liked the fact that it wasn’t as much of a war movie as it was a character study. And if you look at Clint Eastwood’s films, like Unforgiven, Gran Torino, Letters from Iwo Jima…they are all complex character studies, albeit with very different backdrops. So he was absolutely the right director to tell this story in a very raw, truthful way.”
Why Clint Eastwood felt ‘American Sniper’ was such a success
American Sniper was one of Eastwood’s most accomplished movies. It enjoyed critical praise and several Oscar nominations. It also generated $547.4 million worldwide, making it a huge box-office success. Eastwood had his own theory as to why the film performed so well.
“There’s been a lot of news in this last year about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and everybody has opinions on it, but nobody has really thought about it from the point of view of the people that go there,” Eastwood once told the LA Times. “It opens a lot of questions that are fun to broach.”
