Vietnam War erupts in London

Press, 22 September 1987, Page 13

Vietnam War erupts in London

MARC COOPER writes for “American Film” about the making of Stanley Kubrick’s latest film, a Vietnam war story that will be released in Christchurch on Friday.

Actors in Stanley Kubrick’s "Full Metal Jacket” joked about the production being made in England. "The running gag was that Stanley had already shot the film somewhere else and when we got to London he was just going to superimpose us over it,” Adam Baldwin says with a smile. Kubrick and the studio kept advance publicity tightly buttoned, further escalating interest in what Kubrick (who made two anti-war classics, "Paths of Glory” and "Dr Strangelove”) will have to say about Vietnam.

"Jacket” is based on Marine combat correspondent Gustav Hasford’s chronicle, “The ShortTimers,” and was adapted to the screen by Kubrick, Hasford and Michael Herr, whose own book, “Dispatches,” has become a Vietnam era classic. Herr’s quirky script, which reads more like a novel than a screenplay, focuses on Joker (Matthew Modine), a reporter for the Marine Corps’ in-house publication, “Sea Tiger.” Following him and a young rifle squad from their first days at a Marine boot camp in South Carolina, the movie climaxes in the deliriously bloody house-to-house combat that marked the 1968 Tet Offensive In the city of Hue. “When you think of Vietnam, it’s natural to imagine jungles. But this story is about urban warfare. That’s why London

wasn’t such a crazy choice for a location after all,” says Baldwin, who plays Animal Mother, the squad’s muscle-man machine gunner. An old coke-smelting plant (also used in the remake of “1984”) in the East London neighbourhood of Beckton was the main set. Kubrick brought in 50 palm trees from Spain for a tropical accent, but Beckton, bombed out during World War II seemed custom fit for "Jacket.” Some of the local buildings were designed by the same French architect who had worked in Hue, lending more authenticity

to the set. "Beckton was perfect,” says Arliss Howard, who plays Cowboy in the film. “The script called for scorched ground, a lot of rubble, a defoliated area. That’s East London. And we were fortunate because even the weather in England was uncommonly hot during the filming.” After long rehearsals, each scene would be shot three or four times on video. Any every film take, sometimes as many as 75 for a single scene, would be printed and reviewed. "Stanley prints every foot — every frame,” says Baldwin. “He said to us, ‘why not see it all? The film is the cheapest part.’ ” Tony Spiridakis (Captain January) has the longest-running dialogue scene in the movie — some four pages of near-mono-logue. His was the first scene

“First we rehearsed it for a solid week, which in itself is incredible,” he says. “Then from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., all Stanley did was shoot me. You know, like 36 takes. I went home and collapsed. The next morning, Stanley told me ‘I know you can do it. If I have to, I’ll wait for four months till you get it right.’ And everyone’ on the set shivered, because they knew he meant it.”

The scene was finally completed, after a solid month of shooting, when Kubrick decided the off-screen actor playing against Spiridakis was throwing his timing off and replaced him.

The moviemaking routine created a camaraderie among the actors that began to feel much like military life itself.

Here was a group of youngish “grunt” actors under the leadership of the Old General. Then there was the discipline of the production: Up at dawn every morning, and an hour’s bus ride to the docks, with an occasional stop for a half-hour under the tanning bulbs. Then Kubrick’s patient but never-ending series of takes. The grunge and dirt of East London was also, at times, too real. “I hated it,” Baldwin says of the set Dorian Harewood (Eightball) says the battle scenes were so realistic he had to see the doctor twice, fearing that he had blown out his eardrums. “It was as close to war as I ever want to get,” says Harewood. “And all that down time, all that waiting around, turned us

into a ‘unit’ just like in the film. There we were in army garb, rifles in our laps, in the hot weather, sitting around in the dirt and rubble and waiting and waiting, and smoking and playing cards and being away from home and our wives for months. It was the Army!” The natural question about “Jacket” is how will it be affected by the enormous success of “Platoon.” Like “Platoon,” Kubrick’s movie is more about what happened to American soldiers once they landed in Vietnam than how they got there in the first place. “Jacket’s” first act is an uncomprising indictment of the brutal process that passes for “basic training” in the Marine Corps. “You see how plain young

Americans are turned into powerful fighting machines without any regard for the consequences,” says Baldwin. “Individuals are broken down, they are run ragged, they are degraded and dehumanised.”

Spiridakis says that while he thinks there is “not enough politics’’ in the script, he is certain that Kubrick “will pull things out of it that you never saw on paper. “There’s room for more movies about Vietnam than just ‘Platoon.’ These movies have not yet run their course, and, in fact, never will till someone finally makes one from the point of view of the people who won the war — the Vietnamese.”

— Los Angeles Times Syndicate.