American Sniper scribe to direct Thank You For Your Service adaptation

July 1st 2015, 10:27am

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Earlier this year, we learned that Steven Spielberg was contemplating directing an adaptation of the David Finkel non-fiction novel Thank You For Your Service. According to Showbiz 411, after reading the script from AMERICAN SNIPER writer Jason Hall, Spielberg suggested that Hall helm it himself, and he is now in talks to direct. If Hall does sign on, THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE will be his first film as a director.

DreamWorks picked up the rights to the then unpublished manuscript a couple of years ago, and Hall started working on the screenplay in May 2014.

Here's the book synopsis from Amazon:

No journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel embedded with the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous "surge," a grueling fifteen-month tour that changed them all forever.

In Thank You for Your Service, Finkel follows many of those same men as they return home and struggle to reintegrate–both into their family lives and into American society at large. He is with them in their most intimate, painful, and hopeful moments as they try to recover, and in doing so, he creates an indelible, essential portrait of what life after war is like–not just for these soldiers, but for their wives, widows, children, and friends, and for the professionals who are truly trying, and to a great degree failing, to undo the damage that has been done. Thank You for Your Service is an act of understanding, and it offers a more complete picture than we have ever had of two essential questions: When we ask young men and women to go to war, what are we asking of them? And when they return, what are we thanking them for?

I didn't love AMERICAN SNIPER, but it was still a solid war drama in my opinion, and THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE sounds like the perfect type of project for Jason Hall to make his directorial debut with. Have any of you read David Finkel's novel, and what are your thoughts on Hall possibly helming the film adaptation?