Jason Hall’s first meeting with Chris Kyle didn’t start out so well. The screenwriter flew from Los Angeles to Texas in 2010 to meet the ex-Navy SEAL at the Barefoot Ranch near Dallas, where Kyle was drinking with a bunch of Texas Rangers. Hall recalls, “It was a rough room to walk into. I don’t drink, so I didn’t fit in very well.” Hall did, however, wrestle. And after a good-natured grappling in the dining-room bar that ended with one of the Rangers on the floor, the atmosphere grew noticeably warmer. It was, in fact, the beginning of a beautiful, if somewhat awkward, friendship, a partnership between a Hollywood actor-turned-screenwriter and the U.S. military’s most deadly sharpshooter, a hardened veteran of two Iraq wars with 160 confirmed kills. And it’s a friendship made all the more poignant by Kyle’s shocking murder two years ago, at age 38 — he was shot at a Texas gun range on Feb. 2, 2013, by a mentally ill Iraq War veteran whom Kyle had been trying to counsel — along with the Christmas Day release of American Sniper, the film about Kyle that Hall spent four years laboring to get in theaters.
