Full Metal Jacket: The Story of How R. Lee Ermey Made Sgt. Hartman an Icon

this video is brought to you by mubi a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe try movie free for 30 days at moobie.com cinema tyler i was afraid to meet you you are so horrible in that movie i'm i'm a piece of cake you're awful no but is that realistic i mean was that even possible that anybody could be so sadistic and offline yes it was uh you have to kind of understand val that we're sending these kids to vietnam okay this guy's basically a drill instructor is an actor nobody's that nasty could you imagine turning gunnery sergeant hartman loose on the public it wouldn't work with it the character of gunnery sergeant hartman in stanley kubrick's full metal jacket was made iconic by the actor r lee ermey you might have seen irmi's memorable performances in seven the texas chainsaw massacre reboot and toy story code red repeat we are code red recon plan charlie execute let's move had actually been a drill instructor in the marine corps during the vietnam war from 1965 to 1967. he was a troublemaker as a kid and at 17 he was given the choice by a judge to go to a detention center or go into the military he first tried the navy and when they didn't take him he joined the marines who were happy to quote unquote straighten him out by 1965 he was a drill instructor and loving every minute of it before you can be a drill instructor you have to go through the drill instructor school which is a 12 week course and you get really physically fit because you go for a five mile run before chow in the morning he spent 30 months as a drill instructor in san diego and then he was sent to the front lines of the vietnam war where he took shrapnel from an enemy rocket which quote ended his dream of a long career in the core he would never leave the core behind but it wasn't until making fullmetal jacket in the 80s that he would bring not only a real sense of authenticity to a vietnam war film but draw on his past experiences to create one of the most memorable characters of all time this is the story of how arleigh ermey made gunnery sergeant hartman an icon the marine corps lives forever and that means you live forever [Music] ermey retired from the marine corps in 1971 and decided to go to college but he couldn't afford to attend a school in the states so he went to manila in the philippines but found that he couldn't afford the schools there either he started looking for work and would have coffee at the hilton hotel in manila every morning because it was the only place to have the stars in stripes newspaper during this time irmi met his wife who was waitressing at the hotel he became friends with some directors and producers working in the philippine media and soon one asked him to act in some blue jean commercials the pay was good and before long he was doing tobacco commercials and sports equipment commercials stuff he called macho merchandise he wound up in a few local filipino films and then a big american production came to town the movie was francis ford coppola's apocalypse now about the vietnam war if you've been watching my ongoing series on apocalypse now you'll know that kopla managed to strike a deal to film all over the philippine islands irmi asked the only american casting director in manila to help him get involved in the movie the casting director got him into the film as one of the many many background extras on the set he became friends with a technical advisor and when coppola needed someone to act as a helicopter pilot for the incredible flight of the valkyrie sequence he asked ermey and here he is in the final film i've spotted a large weapon down below we're gonna go down and check it out it was a long time between the filming and release of apocalypse now and in the meantime irmi played a drill instructor in a movie called the boys and company c i'm sergeant lewis i'm your drill instructor for the next two fucking months maggot while acting in the boys and company c he also served as the technical advisor which would eventually get the attention of stanley kubrick who was doing pre-production on his own film about the vietnam war called full metal jacket kubrick's brother-in-law and frequent executive producer jan harlan said we needed an advisor who told us exactly how the details work for example the movements that they do with the guns a normal person doesn't know this so we called an office in the united states that represents ex-marines we asked for a drill instructor irmi said i got a phone call from stanley kubrick out of the clear blue one evening and we talked about full metal jacket and he hired me as technical advisor [Music] that's not even my desk ermey hopped on a plane and flew to england where the production would take place you were in vietnam is this realistic when you look at the movie is that it's very realistic i have a cross section when when somebody hires me to do technical advice i like technical advice because i like putting the realism in there it's good for me when army arrived in england he met with kubrick and told him he really felt it was important to make everything as authentic as possible kubrick told him that he felt the same way and wanted it to be the most authentically real vietnam era war story that's ever been put on film and he told me that he wanted it so borderline documentary he wanted it that real he said i'll take care of the story you take care and you give me the realism i want everything as real as you can give it to me i have a little black book and it's i go onto a film to do technical advice i call i've got 50 vietnam veterans at the touch of a phone that i call i go through the script and i go through each and every scene and i make little asterisks then i get on the phone and i start calling i'm talking veterans from new york here to washington state seattle down to florida in a separate interview ermey continued saying i talked to 10 or 15 other vietnam veterans and we decide what would be the best way to handle this situation and i think that works out pretty darn good that way of it's not my opinion it's the opinion of other people that had experiences in vietnam when the actors began arriving at the location irmi was tasked with training them as if they were real recruits hollywood actors uh we had a little problem and that i couldn't get them to show up for me when stanley had a word with them and they began showing up but they would say well let the background extras do that we don't need to i can just pick it up close order drill in the rifle manual you cannot pick up on the set when it's time to do it it doesn't work like that so they uh succumbed we'll put it that way and everybody worked with me and we did well as the training began irmi found himself in the familiar position of drill instructor with the task of whipping soft actors into shape to behave as real marines jan harlan said we observed something very very strange mainly that he went to wardrobe and put on a drill instructor's uniform and he in a way fell back in his role he wore the uniform and he changed his persona he was a very nice man and when he wore the uniform he was a devil i mean he was a drill instructor suddenly our technical advisor comes in and he starts yelling at us i'm the boss and this is that and you're gonna do this and you're a piece of shit i'm like whoa who's this guy this is your technical advisor this is lee ermey he's gonna teach you how to shoot every marine drill instructor has been to recruit training himself so he adopts character traits that his own drill instructors had according to vincent d'onofrio who played private pyle there were no other marines on the set irmi taught all of the actors and background extras how to march and how to do monkey patrol where they spin rifles and stuff like that all of the actors and british extras had a lot of respect for ermey because he trained them and had trained real recruits for the vietnam war now the story of how lee ermey went from just being technical advisor to also playing gunnery sergeant hartman as a whole other story and centers around another actor so that story is getting its own video when army got the part of hartman he was able to use his experiences as a real drill instructor during the vietnam war to add not only authenticity to the role but his real unique experiences while training recruits for combat do you think i'm cute private pile do you think i'm funny sir no sir ermey said in 1966 the sky fell in on us the roof caved in and all of a sudden they needed warm bodies in vietnam now we're picking up 120 privates which if you line 120 privates up boy oh boy it looks like a mule train so we've got twice as many privates four weeks less to train them in but yet now we're not just infiltrating these privates into modern day marine corps now we're sending these privates to vietnam to fight the war irmi explains that the marine corps basic training being cut down to 8 weeks accounts for some of hartman's methods in the film between 1966 and 1973 drill instructors like army trained 335 000 new recruits at either san diego california where irmi served or paris island south carolina the location we see depicted in the film drill sergeants feel ultimately responsible for preparing their recruits for combat so the pressure to make someone like private pile have a fighting chance against the enemy was enormous i've got to send these people to vietnam i'm the one that has to send them they're going to come back in bags they're going to come back in wheelchairs they're going to be maimed they're going to be fucked up people when they come back remember when i said that ermey would go to the hilton in manila because they were the only ones that had the stars in stripes newspaper well ermey was going there to look at the obituaries from the war and whenever he recognized the name of one of his recruits he said it was very painful hermes said you can ask any drill instructor who was down there in 1965-1966 that's exactly the way the drill instructor's demeanor was you slimy fucking wall or fucking piece of shit there was no punches pulled the marine corps never did condone maltreatment it's always been against regulation it's always been against the law but our workload was just terrible so rather than drop him down for 25 push-ups it was real simple and real quick for me to walk past him and drop him to his knees with a little shot to the solar plexus and a little verbal chastising right there on the spot physical nor verbal abuse was is is not now and was not then condoned by the marine corps but it's like the speed limit in the united states i don't know what it is here but it's 65 miles an hour when i'm driving 65 miles an hour i've got cars whizzing past me but it's the individual certainly not the state that allows people to go 80 miles an hour either you see he said that something like what hartman does here what side was that private pile the right side sir would ensure that the recruit would never forget right from left for the rest of his life this makes the fact that most of the squad gets wiped out by a kid all the more powerful of a statement on the war in some cases we have these individuals that seem to won't think that they can take it upon themselves to do things and get by with it and hartman was one of those people and it did go on all that said when asked if he was like the character of hartman he said heaven forbid i love people hartman was warped too rough too harsh too demanding but he was real four inches from your chest pile four engines the rehearsals were intense to say the least kubrick's right-hand man leon vitale pictured here would throw tennis balls and oranges at army while he set his lines irmi said i had to catch the ball and throw it back to leon as fast as possible and say the lines as fast as possible if i were to slur a word drop a word or slow down i had to start over bullshit it looks to me like the best part of you ran down to cracking your mama's ass and ended up as a brown stain on the mattress i think you been cheated i had to do it 20 times without a mistake leon was my drill instructor when they were preparing the first scene which is a long dolly shot filled with dialogue they went through the scene over and over and quote kubrick coached him on the precise inflections and mannerisms he wanted what's interesting is that despite irmi having been a real drill instructor and being so scary as gunnery sergeant hartman the people who knew him described him as being extremely kind and friendly in real life the thing that really makes hartman a great kubrick character is the air of dark humor the stuff that comes out of hartman's mouth is so weirdly hilarious and clever how tall are you private sir five foot nine sir five foot nine i didn't know they stacked shit that high that it keeps you engaged with the story and better allows you to open your mind to receive kubrick's ambiguous message we need a military but that military could very well strip the humanity away from a person like private pyle who is likely drafted into the war against his will or worse the person could end up like the door gunner irmi thought of drill instructors as being similar to stand-up comedians saying that part of it is to keep the recruits engaged in what they are learning irmi actually did some stand-up comedy on the sunset strip in the 70s ermey loved comedy and after full metal jacket he never passed up an opportunity to do a comedic bit especially if it referenced his drill instructor past do you have something to say to me grandpa your burgers are burning whoops up at ease call grandma he and kubrick agreed on the idea of hartman having a darkly comedic element to him jan harlan said we were also surprised about the language because you know alright stanley's script was fairly realistic but lee came up with phrases that were more say picturesque astonishing to say the least every time it was something else he seemed to have an endless resource on obscenities private piled you had best square your ass away and start shitting me tiffany cufflinks or i will definitely fuck you up ermey and kubrick would discuss the scene from a technical advisor standpoint and then they would work out the dialogue together i said you gotta be shitting me joker you think you're mickey's fellaini that's what you think you're a mickey's fellaini you think you're some kind of fucking writer you gotta be shitting me joker you think you're mickey splaine you think you're some kind of writer fucking fuck you fucking that fucking god you put it in you're some kind of fucking writer you gotta be shitting me joker you think you're mickey's fellaine you think you're some kind of fucking writer hermes said i worked with stanley every sunday i went over to stanley's house and he and i worked very closely together and we were sat down and stanley would explain to me what he expected to get out of a particular scene and we would discuss the scene and he would more or less tell me what he would like to see emphasize and what message he wanted to get out of the scene kubrick would punch the button on his tape recorder and i would go on and on and off or off or whatever you want to call it until i ran out of gas i'd do it three or four times and then we would take the tape and we would send it down to production secretary she would transcribe that and send it back up to us and we would just select the juiciest lines out of this 10 or 12 pages of typewritten dialogue just pick the juiciest lines and incorporate those into the scene kubrick said i'd say 50 of lee's dialogue specifically the insult stuff came from lee you see in the course of hiring the marine recruits we interviewed hundreds of guys we lined them all up and did an improvisation of the first meeting with the drill instructor they didn't know what he was going to say and we could see how they reacted lee came up with i don't know 150 pages of insults aside from the insults though virtually every serious thing he says is basically true when he says your rifle is only a tool it is a hard heart to kill you know it's true unless you're living in a world that doesn't need fighting men you can't fault him except maybe for a certain lack of subtlety in his behavior and i don't think the united states marine corps is in the market for subtle drill instructors reportedly ermey improvised the reach around bit and kubrick didn't know what that was so ermey had to explain it to him matthew modine who played joker in the film wrote in his full metal jacket diary that after the film's release kubrick told him a funny story about having to hire a japanese pornographer to translate irmi's lines for the japanese version modin also wrote that during the boot camp scenes irmi had really bad breath so when you would scream in your face you get a nose full of coffee cigarettes and tooth decay i wonder if this was intentional to add to the faces that the actors would make in the scenes looks like jack nicholson took a different approach in the shining i always brush my teeth before i report back in for work why consideration for my co-workers one of the difficulties in playing gunnery sergeant hartman was the constant screaming ah bullshit i can't hear you sir are you sure private piles i will punish all of you ermey was often losing his voice from yelling so much and kubrick would usually do several takes before he was satisfied sometimes his voice would be finished by lunchtime and kubrick would have to stop production that said irmi wasn't subjected to the endless amount of takes that some other actors were hermie said that the most takes he did was in the jelly donut scene and it was a little over 30 takes where is that private pile sir jelly donut sir a jelly donut part of the reason ermey didn't have to do as many takes as some other actors in kubrick's films was that he knew his lines and i don't mean just memorization in the full metal jacket diary matthew modine writes irmi knows his lines the way stanley likes learn to the point that they become unconscious thought organic learn to the point that they are a surprise even to the person saying them learn to the point that there's nothing more appropriate to say but the written line that takes a lot of work were you born a bad slimy's comeback puke piece of shit private pile or did you have to work on it i just want to take a second to mention this episode's bonus material this episode's bonus material is a companion pdf featuring the story of how matthew modine became private joker it's just a dollar and it really helps a channel you can find a link in the description and at the end of the video the shoot with army was going well but then something terrible happened in march 1986 during the middle of production irmi was going for some chinese takeout at around 1 in the morning when his car skidded off the road and crashed into a tree the steering wheel crushed his chest breaking all his ribs on one side kubrick said he probably would have died except he was conscious and kept flashing his lights a motorist stopped it was in a place called epping forest where the police are always finding bodies not the sort of place you get out of your car at 1 30 in the morning and go see why someone's flashing their lights he was trapped in his car with broken ribs for several hours before being rescued and the production had to shut down for four and a half months michael hare who co-wrote the screenplay said that was a terrible period for everyone and kubrick was very worried he couldn't work and he couldn't relax we used the time to rework the screenplay but there wasn't much to change stanley had a good way of putting it if it ain't broke don't fix it at one point tim colceri who was originally cast as hartman before being replaced by army was told he might need to come back and play hartman before the insurance company said that they would cover the production costs during the hiatus while irmi healed shutting down for four and a half months could have destroyed the movie if kubrick wasn't so powerful in the film industry in fact oliver stone managed to get platoon greenlit arguing that kubrick was doing a movie on the subject of the vietnam war which many considered unfilmable even after apocalypse now in part because of the delay adding to kubrick's already lengthy shooting schedule platoon beat full middle jacket to the theaters by six months another interesting bit is that during his recovery irmi managed to improve as an actor so much that even though they had already shot 25 takes of the first scene months ago they went back and shot it all over again i am gunnery sergeant hartman your senior drill instructor cinematographer douglas milsom said it was well worth it because he was so much better when asked about his death in the film hermie had this to say i think really anything is possible in that situation we did have in isolated situations where recruits did commit suicide the pressure the tremendous pressure was on them this situation we're up against here is private pile loses his grip on reality i think in a situation where an individual a human being has lost his grip on reality such as that pretty much anything can happen it's up to the individual himself isn't it and he managed to save a few rounds from the rifle range and he sure killed me i would rather not have been killed either to tell you the truth didn't mommy and daddy show you enough attention when you were a child [Music] that was that was a real blessing even though he's killed halfway through the film lee ermey's performance is usually the main thing people remember from full metal jacket herme used his celebrity status to spread awareness and make a difference in the lives of us veterans with all due respect we all all of us need to pitch in where we can and that includes you aside from many acting roles he was a regular on the history channel and was part of a series called military makeover where they would fix up houses of veterans who needed a little help you know what i always say give a veteran a hug take that veteran to dinner tonight when he started acting his mother was proud but his dad wasn't very happy about it it wasn't until warner brothers found out that irmi's parents hadn't seen full metal jacket and they sent a limo to bring his mom and dad to a private screening that his father realized he was doing okay i want to take a moment to thank today's sponsor moobi mubi is a curated streaming service taylor made for cinephiles like you each movie is hand selected by film experts not an algorithm so you know you're in good hands i love how mubi curates and releases into retrospectives specials and specific sub-genres that take you on a guided journey through the best that cinema has to offer there are 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Channel: CinemaTyler

Views: 517,069

Rating: 4.929481 out of 5

Keywords: cinematyler, kubrick, the making of, behind the scenes, filmmaking, directing, film school, stanley kubrick, r lee ermey, acting, ermey, marines

Id: 6xR2qWrUs1o

Length: 23min 18sec (1398 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020