Trailer
Plot summary
Chris Kyle grows up in Texas, where his father teaches him to shoot and hunt and tells him that people come in three kinds: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. He works as a ranch hand and competes in rodeos, and after the 1998 embassy bombings he enlists in the Navy and qualifies as a SEAL sniper. He meets Taya in a San Diego bar and they marry; on their wedding day his unit gets orders for Iraq. On his first tour he watches over Marine patrols and kills a woman and a boy carrying a grenade toward them. His tally of kills brings the nickname Legend and a bounty on his head, and he hears of Mustafa, a Syrian Olympic medalist sniping for al-Qaeda.
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Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about American Sniper (2014)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Steven Spielberg, originally attached to direct, wanted a more psychological conflict in which an enemy sniper hunts Chris Kyle, and his ideas helped push the screenplay to nearly 160 pages. He dropped out on August 5, 2013, feeling Warner Bros.' budget constraints would not let him realize his vision.
- Bradley Cooper had thought of Chris Pratt for the role of Chris Kyle, but Warner Bros. agreed to buy it only if Cooper himself would star.
- Screenwriter Jason Hall explained why a doll stands in for the baby: "real baby #1 showed up with a fever. Real baby #2 was no show." Clint Eastwood's answer, in Hall's telling, was "Gimme the doll, kid."
- The enemy sniper Mustafa is a major character in the film but gets only a small mention in Chris Kyle's memoir, where Kyle wrote, "I never saw him." In the book, Kyle's 2100-yard shot was taken against an insurgent holding a rocket launcher, not Mustafa.
