Do We Get to Win This Time? is a podcast about how Hollywood has depicted and defined the Vietnam War. You can listen on the Big Picture feed. The following is an excerpt from Episode 7: “Ain’t War Hell.”
Stanley Kubrick had already made one of the greatest anti-war films of all time—honestly, maybe the greatest. In 1957, just a few years into his directing career, Kubrick released Paths of Glory, a searing World War I drama based on Humphrey Cobb’s novel.
Kubrick’s adaptation of Paths of Glory was just as incendiary. It stars Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax, a French military man who leads his troops into combat against the Germans.
The battle scenes feature Douglas marching through the trenches, explosions blasting all around him. (And Kubrick’s visuals in those scenes were so dramatic, they’re still being ripped off today.)
Paths of Glory is about as grim and cynical as a war movie can get—not surprisingly, it’s one of Oliver Stone’s all-time favorite movies. But it was so confrontational that theater owners in France refused to play it for nearly 20 years, and Switzerland banned it altogether. Still, Kubrick’s career took off after Paths of Glory.
By the mid-’80s, Kubrick, who’d been raised in the Bronx, had been living in England for more than a decade. A fear of flying had kept him away from the United States—and from Hollywood. And for years, no one knew what he was up to. So it was kind of a shock when newspaper articles about Kubrick began appearing in early 1984. They claimed he was looking for actors to audition for a Vietnam drama based on a 1979 book called The Short-Timers, written by a veteran named Gustav Hasford.
The Short-Timers was a slim, savage account of a young Marine named Private Joker, following him from basic training to the battlefield. Hasford based The Short-Timers on his experience as a combat correspondent, and the book is dark, funny, and unforgiving.
Kubrick worked on the script for Full Metal Jacket with Hasford, along with Michael Herr, the war journalist who’d written the book Dispatches, as well as the narration for Apocalypse Now. Their movie would begin at the Marine training base in Parris Island, South Carolina. That’s where two recruits—Private Joker, played by Matthew Modine, and Private Pyle, played by Vincent D’Onofrio—are subjected to merciless verbal and physical abuse from Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey).
Ermey joined the Marines in 1961, and later served as a drill instructor, eventually making his way to Vietnam. After he was injured by a rocket, Ermey wound up in Manila, and soon found his way to showbiz.
He would go on to serve as a technical adviser for Apocalypse Now, and began taking acting gigs. He eventually got the attention of Kubrick, who took advantage of Ermey’s military experience while shaping the Full Metal Jacket script.
The director asked Ermey to meet with British military men, and improvise scenes in which he played a drill instructor. The result of all those sessions? Nearly 150 pages of dialogue, some of which, according to Kubrick, was so “off the wall” that it couldn’t even be used in the film. Which is really something when you think about what did make it into Full Metal Jacket.
Ermey’s character would be spoofed and ripped off for years afterward—even though he appears on-screen in Full Metal Jacket for less than 45 minutes.
Most Vietnam films from this era were filmed in tropical locales, like Thailand or the Philippines. But not Full Metal Jacket. Instead, Kubrick chose to shoot in cloudy England, so he could stay close to home. His team found an empty gasworks in East London, and spent a month blowing up and knocking down buildings. They also imported thousands of plants, including 200 palm trees.
For viewers who want their war films to be as realistic as possible, Full Metal Jacket can be kind of irritating: The skies are constantly overcast, and the fake trees … look kinda fake! But for those willing to buy into Kubrick’s version of Vietnam, the feeling that something’s just a little off gives the movie a dreamlike effect. Which is fitting, given that Kubrick had himself become an almost phantom-like figure by the movie’s release.
He spent five years researching and making Full Metal Jacket, all the while staying out of the public eye in England. During that time, Full Metal Jacket remained a tightly kept secret: The release date changed constantly, and cast members declined to talk about the film. And Kubrick himself gave only a handful of interviews to promote it.
According to Hamburger Hill director John Irvin, though, Kubrick did make his presence known—and his power felt—when he needed to. The directors used the same film processing lab in England, and Irvin says an employee there urged Kubrick to sneak an early look at Hamburger Hill.
“I think it’s probably a criminal offense—he sent the film to Stanley’s house,” says Irvin. “And Stanley, in his screening room, watched Hamburger Hill.”
As Irvin tells the story, Kubrick then called up Warner Bros. and told an executive there that Full Metal Jacket’s release date needed to be moved up, that it had to hit theaters before Hamburger Hill.
Kubrick died in 1999, right before the release of Eyes Wide Shut, so there’s no way to verify this story with him (and even if he were alive, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t return my emails about it). But Kubrick’s film did beat Hamburger Hill to theaters that summer by two months.
Full Metal Jacket became a must-see event—thanks in no small part to Ermey’s hilarious and terrifying performance as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. You could view him as a bully, pushing his men toward their physical and emotional limits. Or you could see him as a much-needed reformer—taking these insecure kids and preparing them for the harsh realities of war.
