Fifteen years ago during the early release of his film ”A Clockwork Orange,” a scruffy-looking Stanley Kubrick sat down in a restaurant near his suburban London home to talk about his masterful movie about a timid society dealing with evil in the streets.
Earlier this month an even scruffier-looking Kubrick agreed to talk about his latest film, ”Full Metal Jacket,” a comedy-laced, horror show about another evil, the Vietnam war.
The setting this time was suburban London`s Pinewood studio, inside its magisterial, wood-paneled boardroom, at a long table surrounded by two dozen chairs. Put some candles on the table, and it was a setting worthy of an 18th- Century monarch.
But Kubrick, 58, arrived dressed as if he had just come from a camping trip, wearing a partially buttoned blue shirt and an ink-stained, brown corduroy jacket underneath a blue parka shell. His beard was a tangle, his wispy hair greasy. Only soft, brown eyes behind wire-frame glasses suggested an order beneath the mess.
In fact, Kubrick had been camping out–at his elaborate home studio, working day and night on the sound effects of the film`s last reel.
He looked much the same as 15 years ago. But in those 15 years he had made only three films: ”Barry Lyndon” (1975), ”The Shining” (1980), and now ”Full Metal Jacket.”
These are not the greatest Kubrick films. They fall short of his masterworks: ”Paths of Glory” (1957), ”Dr. Strangelove” (1963) and ”2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968).
”Full Metal Jacket” falters only near the end, leaving us wanting more, following a tragic and savagely funny first act of Marines in training. Yet the humor in ”Full Metal Jacket” is so raw, its horror so unflinching, that seeing it reminds one that Kubrick`s near-best work is more adult, more complex and more audacious than the movies of virtually any other filmmaker today.
An American citizen who has lived in London for a quarter-century, Kubrick is the stuff of legend–the Howard Hughes of the cinema. By comparison, reclusive Woody Allen is a regular Pia Zadora in terms of accessibility, making a film each year and dining and performing in high-profile New York boites.
Meanwhile the Kubrick legend grows, fueled by few films and few public statements.
”There`s so much misinformation about me,” he said last week in his soft, rapid, New York-accented voice, often punctuated with him clearing his throat.
”The stories get more elaborate as they`re repeated in the papers,” he said. ”I`ve read that I wear a football crash helmet in a car, and I don`t allow my driver to go over 30 miles per hour. Well, I drive a white Porsche 928S. It`s a lot of fun to drive. I don`t wear a football helmet or any other helmet, and I don`t have a driver. So the story is pretty inaccurate.
”Practically everything I read about me is grotesquely wrong. I read one story where a guy said that I hire a helicopter to spray my garden because I don`t like mosquitos. Well, No. 1, there are no mosquitos, and No. 2, it`s completely preposterous. The only `story` about me that`s true is that I don`t like to fly.
”I`m not a recluse. I lead a relatively normal life, I think. But this stuff has been written and rewritten so often it takes on a life of its own.” What about Kubrick`s London home, often described as a secretive compound.
”I don`t live in any massively guarded compound,” he said. ”I live in a nice country house outside of London. It has about 25 rooms, 15 of which are devoted to filmmaking: editing rooms, screening rooms, and offices. The only gate I have is one four-feet high to keep our dogs from running out onto the road.”
His living in London produced speculation that he may have purposely turned his back on America.
”There have been all sorts of stories about why I live in London but it`s really very simple: In order to be at home some of the time I have to live in a production center, and there are only three places in the world that fulfill this requirement in a practical sense. If you want to make English-language movies, it has to be done in Los Angeles, New York or London.
”I love New York City, though my wife doesn`t. But it would rank third in the list of cities with the best production facilities, London being second. Hollywood of course has the best facilities, but I have never enjoyed living there (where he took over the direction of ”Spartacus,” completed in 1960). I found the sense of insecurity and the whiff of malevolence that surrounds you there unsettling.
”So London seemed a very natural choice, though I cannot say a decision was ever reached. We had a lovely house there at the time I was making `2001,` which we returned to. I had three daughters who were growing up and who were by then involved in English schools, and I had a dog that I could not take out of England and bring back without putting it into quarantine for six months. So I would say it was more of a de facto kind of a thing than a decision.”
(The dog that played a role in the Kubrick legend was a West Highland terrier named Andy.)
With his daughters now adults and his third marriage–to painter Christiane Kubrick–firmly in place, Kubrick says of his lifestyle: ”I generally go out to the theater and to dinner once or twice a week when I`m not making films.”
For the last three years, however, he has been making ”Full Metal Jacket,” based on Gustav`s Hasford`s ”The Short-Timers,” a memoir/novel of Vietnam during the Tet offensive of 1968, when the North Vietnamese soldiers overran American troops in dozens of surprise raids, including 10 days of fierce street fighting in the city of Hue. (The 1980 paperback will be re-released shortly by Bantam Books.)
”Since I have not written any original screenplays,” Kubrick said, explaining how he chooses his subject material, ”all the films I have made have started by my reading a book. Those books that have been made into films have almost always had some aspect about them which on first reading left me with the sense that, `This is a fantastic story; is it possible to make it into a film?`
”I`m always suspicious when a book looks like too much of a sure thing. It usually means that it`s too similar to other things, and your mind clicks into place too easily, understanding how it might be made into a film.
”The hardest thing for me to do,” he said, ”is finding the story. It`s much harder than financing, writing the script, making the film, editing it, whatever.
”The fact that each of the last three films has taken about five years has been because it is so hard to find something I think is worth doing.
”I didn`t set out to do a Vietnam film,” he said. ”I don`t work that way. A good story suitable for making into a film is so rare, subject matter is secondary. I was just reading and reading. When I`m looking for a story, I read an average of about five hours each day, based on recommendations in newsletters and also reading at random.
”About five years ago I came across the novel `The Short-Timers,` and after the first few pages it was clear that this was an extraordinary work of originality. When I finished it I thought to myself that this might make a great film if it were possible to put it on film.”
The specific appeal?
”Well of course the first thing was the writing, the dialogue, and its sense of uncompromising truth. The book offered no easy moral or political answers; it was neither pro-war nor antiwar. It seemed only concerned with the way things are. There is a tremendous economy of statement in the book, which I have tried to retain in the film. All of the `mandatory` scenes, explaining who everybody is–that this guy had a drunken father and that that guy`s wife is a . . . –are left out. What you find out about the characters all comes from the main action of the story.
”On the second page the drill sergeant says (to a wiseacre trainee he`s about to tongue-lash), `I like you. You can come over to my house and —- my sister.”`
That vulgar, comic, contradictory line, which caught Kubrick`s eye in
”The Short-Timers,” sets much of the tone of ”Full Metal Jacket,” which is wittier, colder and just as profound as ”Platoon.”
”I saw `Platoon` only a month ago,” Kubrick said. `I liked it. I thought it was very good.”
But Kubrick said the screening had no effect on his film. ”We weren`t too happy about our M-16 rifle sound effects, and when I heard M-16s in
`Platoon,` I thought they sounded about the same as ours.
”The strength of `Platoon,` ” he continued, ”is that it`s the first of what I call a `military procedural` that is really well done, where you really believe what`s going on. I thought the acting was very good and that it was dramatically very well written.
”That`s the key to its success: It`s a good film. It certainly wasn`t a success because it was about Vietnam.
”What never fails to surprise me about the people who finance pictures is that they think by packaging and market research they can avoid the
(problems associated with) making a good film. They will try to assess the potential of a film with market research. They ask people whether they`d be interested in a film on a particular subject, with certain actors, and give them a pretty inadequate description of the movie–and from this they will often make very important decisions.
`With the exception of certain sequels to giant successes, I don`t think the audience knows what it wants to see. It`s pretty obvious they want to see a good film that entertains them.
”Only the ending of `Platoon,` ” Kubrick said, ”seemed a bit soft to me in the optimism of its narration.” He was referring to the narrator`s noble wish that the war`s survivors recover and build a new life. Some Vietnam veterans have expressed the same skepticism about their ability to rebuild their lives.
There`s nothing that soft in ”Full Metal Jacket.” If ”Platoon” warmly embraces the wounded Vietnam vet, ”Full Metal Jacket” rudely confronts those who didn`t fight with both the realities and ironies of that war, as well as with the perverse way the American establishment sold the war to soldier and citizen alike.
”One of the notable things about the Vietnam war was that it was manipulated in Washington by hawk intellectuals who tried to fine-tune reality like an advertising agency, constantly inventing new jargon like `Kill ratios,` `Hamlets pacified,` and so forth. The light was always at the end of the tunnel.”
The film`s leading light in ”Full Metal Jacket” is a bright young man nicknamed Joker (Matthew Modine), who, after basic training, is sent to Vietnam to work for a Marine newspaper away from the fighting. Then he smarts off once too often and winds up in combat during the Tet offensive in rubble- strewn Hue City.
”Full Metal Jacket” sets its combat in harshly lit barracks and urban daylight, rather than in the lush, green-black, Southeast Asian jungle of most Vietnam films. The battle scenes, filled with haunting, burned-out, bullet-ridden buildings and naked walls on fire (including one shaped like the monolith in `2001`) were filmed at an abandoned gasworks in East London.
That visual choice, in addition to being true to the novel, is typical of Kubrick, who prefers the bright light of day–or brightly illuminated interiors–to capture our attention.
”I just try to photograph things realistically,” the former Look magazine photographer said. ”I try to light them as they really would be lit. When inside, I use practical lights and windows and not any supplemental lights. I`m after a realistic, documentary-type look in the film, especially during the fighting. Even the Steadicam shots purposefully aren`t very steady. We wanted a newsreel effect.”
Over the years Kubrick has filmed many courageous and outrageous warriors, from Kirk Douglas crawling over the trenches under withering fire in ”Paths of Glory,” to Slim Pickens whoopin` and hollerin` and riding an A-bomb to oblivion in ”Dr. Strangelove,” to a most contradictory character called Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin) in ”Full Metal Jacket.”
We find ourselves cheering Animal`s bravery toward the end of the picture, even though we immediately despise the sight of him, covered in bandoliers of bullets, wearing a full metal jacket, you might say.
”Courage is appealing, isn`t it?” Kubrick said, leaving us to wonder if a point being made with the title is that American boys were playing a deadly game ”unclothed,” without proper metal jackets.
Kubrick said he didn`t use the book`s original title, ”The Short-Timers,” because it didn`t seem strong enough. ”Movie titles have a special problem in that most of your ads are just the title. I think a good title should not sound like any other film. It does not have to be descriptive but it should not be misleading and it should sound good when you say it.
”The title `Full Metal Jacket` refers to a type of bullet design where the lead bullet is copper-jacketed, to increase the reliability of bullet feeding up the ramp into the chamber, and, I believe, the FMJ is also regarded as more humane than lead bullets by the Geneva Convention on warfare. There are other types of bullets called `lead round-nosed,` `semi-wad cutter` and so forth.”
A New York native, Kubrick said he learned about bullets when he owned and fired a .38-caliber pistol while working in Los Angeles making
”Spartacus.” ”I think I had a gun there because I was so amazed how easy it was to get one in California.”
Affection for weapons is an often-repeated image in ”Full Metal Jacket,” which begins brilliantly with the image of a seemingly benign instrument, an electric hair clipper, turned into a weapon of sorts. The image: Raw recruits being shorn like a parade of sheep to the tune of Tom T. Hall`s wistful country-western song, ”Hello Vietnam.” It`s a funny-but-chilling, typically Kubrick, cowboy-military melange.
Then the young Marines go through riotously comic and violent basic training as we meet Joker and most of the film`s other major characters, including a simple Texan called Cowboy, a gentle photographer called Rafterman and a tubby, incompetent recruit nicknamed Pyle, as in Gomer Pyle.
The young soldiers are led–make that slapped, insulted and kicked
–through their paces by a drill sergeant played memorably by former Marine drill instructor and Vietnam vet Lee Ermey, hired first as a consultant to the film.
But Kubrick replaced the actor originally hired to play the drill instructor with Ermey, after seeing that the teacher was a better performer than the pupil ever could be. Shooting was stopped for five months, however, after Ermey suffered five broken ribs in a car accident. Kubrick has the power in the movie world to wait longer than most films take to shoot.
The central idea of ”Full Metal Jacket,” according to Kubrick, is expressed about half-way into the movie, long after we have become accustomed to the character of Joker as a purposeful contradiction.
Joker is smart enough to have earned a student deferment, yet he`s in Vietnam. In one moment he can be exceedingly kind to the misfit trainee Pyle; later, he can be coerced into pummelling the poor slob along with the rest of his company. He wears a peace button on his uniform, but his helmet reads
”Born to Kill.”
