Take a look back with Full Metal Jacket stars Matthew Modine and Vincent D’Onofrio
Last month marked the 30th Anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s penultimate feature, Full Metal Jacket. Warner Bros. Pictures celebrated the festivities with an anniversary screening in Los Angeles last weekend. Before the event, ComingSoon.net had the chance to sit down with stars Matthew Modine and Vincent D’Onofrio alongside Leon Vitali, Kubrick’s longtime assistant. In the player below, you can watch as they reflect on the film all these years later. While both Modine and D’Onofrio explain that they have trouble watching the movie, D’Onofrio explains that he’s planning to watch a specific part of it at the special screening.
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Released domestically in June 1987, Full Metal Jacket arrived at the tail end of a Hollywood fascination with the Vietnam War. Oliver Stone’s Platoon, released the previous year, had just taken home four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Full Metal Jacket, though, arriving seven years after The Shining, wasn’t so much about Vietnam as it was about the dehumanizing side of war and a savage contradiction that, as Joker explains at one point, reflects “the duality of man.”
If you’d like to learn more about the making of Full Metal Jacket, be sure to check out Modine’s Full Metal Jacket Diary. Released in 2005, the book prints Modine’s photography shots from set. Kubrick normally didn’t allow any outside photos on his sets, but Modine, playing a journalist, wound up being allowed to take and eventually share impressive black and white images from behind the scenes.
Also starring Adam Baldwin, Dorian Harewood, Arliss Howard and R. Lee Ermey, Full Metal Jacket received an Oscar nomination for its screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford.
When was the last time you revisited Full Metal Jacket? How do you feel it compares to Stanley Kubrick’s other works? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!