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Thank You for Your Service: An Interview with Director Jason Hall
Interview and review by Sandra Olmsted
With Thank You for Your Service, debut director Jason Hall, who also wrote the screenplay, seems to have found his passion with films about the modern experience of military service. The Oscar nominated Hall wrote the screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s biopic American Sniper, and Hall said he “was handed” David Finkel’s book, Thank You for Your Service, by Steven Spielberg, who was initially attached to direct Sniper. Spielberg asked Hall to write an adaptation of Finkel’s book, which Spielberg planned to direct.
Directing the film, however, eventually went to Hall, who comes from a military family and saw first had the change in his brother after servicing in war. Hall also witnessed the “after war” as Finkel calls it, while spending time with legendary Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the subject of Eastwood’s film. I had the privilege of being part of a round table interview with Jason Hall recently, where he spoke eloquently of his film.
For the guy who play the role of Devon MacLeish in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hall has come along way, and now he is fortunate to have mentors like Eastwood and Spielberg as he switches from acting to directing. Of their different directing styles, Hall says Eastwood “looks for truth” in the scenes and likes to keep “loose” while Spielberg is about the “feeling” and emotion in a scene. Hall seems to work from a hybrid of the two in his film, Thank You for Your Service.
In “Thanks for Your Service,” director Jason Hall takes on the problem of chronicling the return to civilian life as it hasn’t been done since “The Best Years of Our Lives” did for returning WWII veterans.
Hall takes on the problem of chronicling the return to civilian life as it hasn’t been done since The Best Years of Our Lives did for returning WWII veterans. Although Hall’s film has been compared to The Best Years of Our Lives and although he embraced the “social realism” of the 1946 film by casting veterans in extra roles, Hall also embraces the fact that returning home has been different for service members this time.
Hall said that today’s soldiers have suffered more traumatic brain shocks due to the number of “blast wave” they experience in battle now. The damage caused by these blasts is far worse than the public realizes, and in the film, Will (Joe Cole), was “blown up seven times” and lived to tell about it. Solo (Beulah Koale) also suffers from the same problem; however, the death of SFC James Doster (Brad Beyer) is what really haunts Solo and main character Shu aka Adam Schumann (Miles Teller).
Hall goes down the “rabbit hole” of exploring the “after war” and informing the public about the problems veterans face in readjusting to life as civilians though these three central characters and their families, especially Adam’s wife Saskia (Haley Bennett), Solo’s Alea (Keisha Castle-Hughes), and Doster’s widow Amanda (Amy Schumer). The salvation for Shu and Solo comes when Will’s mother gives Shu the name of a place called Pathway Home in Yountville, California and an overburdened VA counselor gets Shu a place in the treatment program.
When asked why the film didn’t show at least some of the treatment that Solo and Shu eventually receive, Hall responded that in “the first draft” and “various drafts, Fred Gusman,” the founder of Pathways, “was the protagonist”; however, the including their treatment would have made the film much too long and detracted from more serious messages.
For Hall, what people need to take away from the film is both the truth and the emotion of the desperate problems of returning veterans. Our service members are returning with more several physical injuries that ever before, yet it is the “unseen” injuries to their hearts and minds, both physical and emotional that need to be treated by a VA that does not have the time and resources to help our heroes. Due to short staffing and budget problems, the wait times for help is mostly months and sometimes years for the help that veterans need immediately. One of the most startling ideas that Hall brings to light is the “unseen injuries,” and when Solo express how he would rather have lost body parts than have had his brain scrambled, it is heartbreaking.
The hopeful moments, such as they are, come in what these men are willing to sacrifice for their brothers in arms. When Will can take it no longer because his fiancée took their daughter, cleaned out his bank account, and let him to come home to an empty apartment, Shu welcome Will into his home. Finally, Gusman’s “Trauma Group,” offers Shu and Solo the salvation they need to re-enter civilian life and reconnect with their families.
Thank You for Your Service, a Universal Pictures release, is rated R for strong violent content, language throughout, some sexuality, drug material and brief nudity and runs 108 minutes. Just in time for Veterans’ Day on Nov. 11, Thank You for Your Service opened with special screenings at AMC Theaters Thursday Oct. 26, to which veterans and active-duty service members were offered free tickets. In theaters just before Veterans’ Day on Nov. 11, it might just be our duty to see Jason Hall’s Thank You for Your Service.
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PHOTO CAPTION: Shu (aka) Adam Schumann (Miles Teller) and Adam’s wife Saskia (Haley Bennett) struggle with his PTSD in “Thank You For Your Service,” which opens just in time for Veteran’s Day.
In “Thanks for Your Service,” director Jason Hall takes on the problem of chronicling the return to civilian life as it hasn’t been done since The Best Years of Our Lives did for returning WWII veterans.
