The world’s most reclusive movie director is on the radio to an assistant, directing him like it’s a game of blind man’s bluff. “Go here, turn left, straight ahead, turn again.” The assistant stops in front of a Port-o-Potty.
“OK,” says Stanley Kubrick on the radio, “open the door.” Kubrick is trapped inside.
That’s just one of the tales recounted in “Full Metal Jacket Diary,” Matthew Modine’s just-published memoir of his year-long stint on the set of one of Hollywood’s most celebrated war films.
Other stories are equally wild, including such anecdotes as:
* Kubrick is setting up a shot. His star isn’t there. He has crept up on the roof of the building. He feels, “trapped in a cage. But high enough to look down and feel safe. Away from He who smiles like a man, laughs like a man, but is a Devil.”
* Earlier in the shoot, the star was haunted by a vision of a little demon who looked like Dennis Hopper and stood on his shoulder saying, “You’re dying, man.”
* Kubrick, the world’s most feared director, calls action. His actors run into a burning building. Fire marshals call a halt because the situation has become dangerous. The crew wonders if the set is going to burn down, as it did on the director’s last movie, “The Shining.”
Maybe the “Shining” fire was an accident, but “there are some people who believe it was perhaps Stanley,” who did it, says Modine, 46, who was 26 when he started filming “Full Metal Jacket” in a polluted, abandoned London gasworks under the exacting eye of an exasperating genius.
Modine believed Kubrick, who died in 1999, capable of almost anything in pursuit of his art. But the actor’s appreciation for the director is apparent on every page of his thoughtful, penetrating and funny “Full Metal Jacket Diary.”
Illustrated with scores of Modine’s photos, the limited-edition book sports an an eye-catching metal jacket. It’s part coffee table book, part body armor. Prints of Modine’s photos from the set will be on display at the Holasek Weir gallery next month.
The diary Modine kept during the agonizingly long 1985-1986 shoot in London could be a movie itself. (There have been inquiries).
It’s the story of a fresh-faced new recruit, a Mormon from Utah, who gets sent far from home into a trying, semi-sane experience he eventually can no longer make sense of. Kubrick is like the all-powerful drill sergeant punishing him at every step.
Modine hesitated to publish the diary, even after Kubrick’s death.
“I respected his privacy,” he says. “I don’t think the diary is a breach of that confidence. I think that the book honors Stanley. In many ways it’s a tool for trying to understand him.”
Modine’s wife Cari (they’ve now been married nearly 25 years) got pregnant shortly after the couple moved to London to begin filming. They moved there early because Modine, who had already starred in films like “Vision Quest” and “Birdy,” was nevertheless so broke that he needed the $40 per diem.
When Cari needed an emergency C-section, Kubrick told Modine he couldn’t leave the set (“She’s having the baby. Not you. You’ll be in the way.”). Modine threatened to cut himself to get taken to the hospital, so Kubrick relented but ordered him to return after the birth.
When Modine came back with cigars, telling everyone his new son’s name is Boman, Kubrick snapped, “Why don’t you give him a normal name?”
Modine has a droll touch with stories like the one when the actor playing the gunnery sergeant had to take a break due to hoarseness. That’s when the technical advisor, a former drill sergeant named R. Lee Ermey, filled in.
Ermey was so pumped up (many of those famously unprintable insults were ad libs) that Kubrick fired the actor and hired Ermey for what became the most indelible drill-sergeant act ever.
Modine is so anti-war that he turned down Tom Cruise’s part in “Top Gun” as “propaganda.” Yet he has three siblings who served in Vietnam and regularly visits wounded troops at Walter Reed Army Hospital.
He’s invariably puzzled by vets’ reaction to his devastatingly anti-war picture: “They love it.”