Watch Clint Eastwood Narrate a Lonely 'American Sniper' Scene

After a successful limited run at the end of last year, Clint Eastwood’s freshly Oscar-nominated film American Sniper is going wide this weekend and early predictions have it pegged as the movie to beat at the box office. Certainly Sniper’s nods for Best Picture and Best Actor for star Bradley Cooper will only increase the already high interest in this military drama, which dramatizes the exploits of real-life Navy SEAL sharpshooter and Iraq War veteran Chris Kyle.

While the film contains a number of pulse-pounding, tension-filled wartime sequences, it also explores the toll Kyle’s multiple tours of duty takes on his mind, body and soul. Maybe that’s why Eastwood decided to devote this new “Anatomy of a Scene” video, produced with The New York Times, to a quiet moment that takes place far away from the battlefield.

In the scene, Kyle is just back from Iraq, but is lingering in a local bar, finding it difficult to return to his wife (Sienna Miller) and children. “He’s been away from home a long time, and is having a hard time making up his mind whether to go home and get re-acquainted with his family,” Eastwood explains in voiceover, adding that he deliberately isolated Cooper in the frame for this sequence. “I wanted him to be a solitary man at that particular moment. I didn’t have to tell [Bradley] very much; he understood the script very well. I’m sort of a minimalist, I don’t like to hear myself talk unless I’ve got something that I feel is important to say.”