Born To Kill 10 BehindTheScenes Facts About Full Metal Jacket

Born To Kill: 10 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About Full Metal Jacket

Many critics consider Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket to be the best war movie ever. Here’s some offscreen trivia about the making of the film.

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Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is more darkly comedic than the average war film, but its portrayal of war is as shocking and terrifying and bleak as you’ll find in any other entry in the genre. Praised by contemporary critics for its complex themes, gorgeous visuals, and powerful performances, Full Metal Jacket was an instant classic that captivated audiences.

At the 60th Academy Awards, Kubrick and his co-writers were nominated for the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. And the script was just the first stage of a long, complicated production process. Here are 10 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About Full Metal Jacket.

10 Matthew Modine inadvertently convinced Stanley Kubrick to change the ending

Pvt. Joker was originally going to die at the end. In a 2017 radio interview on Philadelphia station WMMR’s Preston & Steve Show, Matthew Modine detailed how he inadvertently convinced Stanley Kubrick to change the ending of Full Metal Jacket. During a creative discussion, Modine blurted out that Joker should survive the movie.

Kubrick told him to explain why, and Modine said that after watching his friends die and killing a teenager in battle, Joker should have to live with those experiences, because that would be even worse than dying, and that’s “the real horror of war.” Kubrick agreed and changed the ending of the movie on the spot.

9 R. Lee Ermey yelled at Stanley Kubrick to get the role of Gunnery Sgt. Hartman

Due to his experience in the Marines as a drill instructor, R. Lee Ermey was a consultant on the realism of the military procedures depicted in Full Metal Jacket. Ermey didn’t believe that the actors hired lived up to real military standards, and asked Stanley Kubrick if he could play Gunnery Sgt. Hartman himself.

When Kubrick refused, Ermey yelled an order at Kubrick to stand up when he was being spoken to, and a shocked Kubrick instinctively jumped to his feet. This earned Ermey the role. In order to keep Hartman’s scenes authentic, Kubrick limited the amount of time that Ermey fraternized with the actors playing his recruits.

8 Denzel Washington was up for the role of Eightball

Some major movie stars were up for parts in Full Metal Jacket. Denzel Washington was under consideration for the role of Eightball, and has since said that he regrets missing out on it. Arnold Schwarzenegger was offered the role of Animal Mother, but he turned it down to play the lead role in The Running Man.

Val Kilmer auditioned to play Pvt. Joker and reportedly confronted Matthew Modine in a restaurant and threatened him physically, feeling that Modine had stolen the part from him. Oddly enough, Modine didn’t even have the role yet. This was how he learned about it, and subsequently contacted Kubrick and ended up landing it.

7 A deleted scene saw Marines playing soccer with a human head

Full Metal Jacket was the first Stanley Kubrick film to be edited on a computer as opposed to being spliced together from pieces of celluloid by hand. As with any movie, a few moments got cut here and there, but there was also a pretty significant scene that got entirely cut from the film.

It saw a group of Marines playing soccer, with a shocking reveal at the end showing that they weren’t kicking a soccer ball around; they were playing soccer with a human head. A similar scene ended up in Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s apocalyptic comedy This is the End, albeit with a more slapstick-y bent.

6 Stanley Kubrick crashed a car when he got distracted by a location he liked

During the location scout, Stanley Kubrick was driving his wife’s new SUV around the jungle with R. Lee Ermey and cinematography Douglas Milsome. The director spotted a location out the window that he wanted to use for the film, and while he was explaining to Milsome what he envisioned shooting there, he got distracted from his driving and crashed into a ditch that was six feet deep.

The SUV rolled onto its side during the collision. No one was hurt too badly, and apparently, as the three guys clambered out of the wreckage of the vehicle, Kubrick continued talking to Milsome about the location.

5 Vincent D’Onofrio gained a record-breaking amount of weight for the movie

In preparation for Full Metal Jacket, Vincent D’Onofrio broke the record for most weight gained by an actor for a film role. The record was previously held by Robert De Niro, who gained 60 lbs to play boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. D’Onofrio gained 70 lbs to play Pvt. Pyle. It took him seven months to gain the weight and a further nine months to take it off again after filming was complete.

The extra weight affected D’Onofrio’s physical movements, and as a result, he tore ligaments in his knee on the obstacle course. R. Lee Ermey once said that he believed D’Onofrio’s performance was the movie’s finest.

4 Cinematographer Douglas Milsome threw the camera’s shutter off sync for the battle scenes

One of the aspects of Full Metal Jacket that has been unanimously praised by critics is its bleak, brutal, horrifying depiction of battle scenes. It’s impossible to properly depict the horrors of war in a completely realistic way, but Full Metal Jacket comes pretty close.

This was the result of some interesting experimentation by cinematographer Douglas Milsome. When he was shooting the battle scenes, Milsome deliberately threw the camera’s shutter off sync to create a disorienting effect. Fellow cinematographer Janusz Kamiński would later replicate this technique to shoot equally brutal and disorienting battle sequences for Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

3 R. Lee Ermey ad-libbed some of his dialogue

It’s a common misconception that R. Lee Ermey improvised all of his dialogue for Full Metal Jacket, but he did improvise some of it. This was practically unheard of for a Stanley Kubrick film. He was the kind of director who would call cut if an actor missed out an “um” that was in the script, or substituted “y’know” for “you know.”

One example of an ad-libbed line is Hartman’s mention of “a reach-around” to Pvt. Cowboy. Kubrick interrupted the take so he could ask Ermey, “What the hell is a reach-around?” Ermey explained what it meant, Kubrick laughed, and they went back to shooting.

2 Vincent D’Onofrio thought the call saying he’d been cast was a prank

When he heard about the auditions for Full Metal Jacket from Matthew Modine, Vincent D’Onofrio was a barely experienced actor working as a bouncer at a nightclub. He rented a video camera and found some army fatigues to shoot an audition tape for the role of Pvt. Pyle and sent it to Stanley Kubrick.

He didn’t expect much to come from the audition, and when Kubrick’s people called him to tell him he’d gotten the part, D’Onofrio hung up the phone, thinking it was one of his friends pulling a prank. The actor credits this casting with giving him his career.

1 Stanley Kubrick almost didn’t let Matthew Modine leave the set for his wife’s delivery

In his memoir, Matthew Modine chronicled a rather shocking story about Stanley Kubrick’s commitment to the work on Full Metal Jacket. One day, during shooting, Modine’s wife went into labor. Naturally, he wanted to leave the set and go to the hospital to be at her side for the delivery of their child. But Kubrick wouldn’t let him leave.

Modine apparently had to threaten to injure himself so he could get off the set and to the hospital, before Kubrick finally allowed him to leave. Kubrick was a dedicated auteur, but come on, that was the birth of Modine’s child!

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/full-metal-jacket-behind-scenes-facts-stanley-kubrick-movie/

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