STANLEY KUBRICK’S WAR REALITIES

Every year or so, there’s at least one of them, one film made under such secrecy that even rumors of it are hard to come by. “Full Metal Jacket” is it this time around and the fact that the man who shot the film in Britain is Stanley Kubrick goes a long way to explaining the maximum security surrounding it.

In a recent interview at his well-secluded country home near London, the bearded 58-year-old director answered questions about the production, which opens Friday in the United States.

Kubrick’s decision to make the Vietnam War film in Britain was strengthened by his conviction that “sometimes it’s cheaper and more accurate to build ‘reality’ than to go to it.”

“The main action, set in Hue during the Tet offensive in 1968, is World War II-type street fighting--this is not a jungle picture,” Kubrick said. “News photos taken after battle show Hue looking as if an atom bomb had hit it.”

The film maker’s research showed that the French industrial architecture of Vietnam was mainly 1930s industrial functionalism. “We discovered British Gas owned an area about a mile square in ruins, and scheduled for total demolition, and we got permission to do what we liked with it. We had an explosives demolition team at work for a week blowing up buildings and a wrecking ball and chain under the supervision of the art director for about six weeks. In this way, we achieved something unique which could not be done in any other way for any amount of money.

“I don’t think any film has ever had such vast and genuine ruins to work with,” Kubrick said. “Because of the isolated geography of the place we were also able to light huge fires and create giant pillars of smoke.” He said the film “achieved something that looked exactly like the photographs of what was left of the city of Hue. It is not easy to get research on Vietnamese signs but we went to the Library of Congress, which had microfilm editions of most Vietnam newspapers and magazines of the period and replicated what we found in their pages.”

During the filming, Kubrick and Warner Bros. brought in some 5,000 Vietnamese immigrants living in London and its surroundings for the crowded street scenes of 1968 Da Nang. Members of the Britain’s part-time Territorial Army, the counterpart of the U.S. National Guard, were used as Marine Corps grunts stationed at the Parris Island, S.C., boot camp, where the film’s first 40 minutes take place.

About that name change? Kubrick said the title of Gustav Hasford’s 1979 book, “The Short Timers,” on which the film is based, was fine--if you knew it referred to Marine recruits Magic Marking their days of Vietnam duty off the calendar. “But to some,” he said, “it might suggest folk on a half-day’s work. ‘Full Metal Jacket’ refers to a bullet design used by police and military the world over in which a lead bullet is encased in a copper jacket. It helps it feed into the gun better. And unlike a lead bullet, it doesn’t expand on entering the body. The Geneva Convention on warfare makes a point of this.

“I guess,” he said, “it’s thought to be more humane.”

The book found Kubrick, rather than the reverse. “I was immediately struck by the story, the characters, the dialogue and the economy of statement which Hasford used to such searing effect. Newsweek called it ‘The best work of fiction about the Vietnam War.’ All the mandatory war scenes had been stripped away and Hasford allowed himself only the principal events of the story to illuminate the characters.”

The screenplay, which was adapted by Kubrick, Hasford and “Dispatches” author Michael Herr, divides into two segments. Unlike in style, each climaxes in an awesome illustration of the destructiveness ingrained by training or tradition. In the first, the “maggots” (Marines who are crystallizing into “grunts”) go through a training course that “weds” them to their rifles with Zen-like exaltation, so that it becomes “she,” until one of them suffers a bloody “major malfunction.”

In the film’s second half, set in Vietnam and shot with the gritty naturalism of a combat newsreel, a Marine patrol experiences another bloody epiphany but this time at the trigger finger of an outsider who acts on the impulses of a fierce patriotism. “Genuine motivation versus professional indoctrination,” is how Kubrick put it. The white, clean, torture-chamber look of the Parris Island training camp is the opposite of the blitzed, formless city of Hue but the “paths of glory” these days lead to the asylum as well as the grave.

The film frequently allows the grimness to relax into an embittered comedy as the men experience the gigantic foul-ups of the war. Compared with the Pentagon hawks who took an Olympian view of humankind’s destruction in Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” the grunts speak like cynics who enjoy pulling the pin on the grenade and fragmenting reason. “I wanted to be the first kid on the block to get a confirmed kill,” says one being interviewed by a TV-camera team, while another adds, “I wanted to meet stimulating people of an ancient culture and kill them.”

Kubrick said the on-camera sequence “seemed a very economical way of stating a cross section of prevailing attitudes on Vietnam and at the same time sending up the media.”

Even more than in “Dr. Strangelove,” the vocabulary spawned by Vietnam is used in “Full Metal Jacket” to mask--and mock--reality. “Vietnam was such a phony war, in terms of the hawkish technocrats fine-tuning the facts like an ad agency, talking of ‘kill ratios’ and ‘hamlet pacification’ and encouraging men to falsify a body count or at least total up the ‘blood trails’ on the supposition they would lead to bodies,” Kubrick said.

Then there were the combat newspapers that the film makers combed for hearts-and-minds stories, including those in the Marines’ Sea Tiger newspaper. Kubrick said even the newspapers read as if “they’d cooked up their news out of Hollywood movies of the 1940s.”

The Parris Island camp was built on an industrial estate at Enfield--and checked for accuracy by Lee Ermey. When Kubrick contacted him to be technical adviser, Ermey was retired on disability pay and working in a factory as a quality controller--an irony that didn’t escape the film maker.

“I was first struck by his extraordinary ability as an actor when we videotaped him interviewing British Territorial Army paratroop types who were being considered as U.S. Marines. Lee lined them up like recruits who had just come off the bus into Parris Island and let go with the barrage of intimidation and insults which the occasion always brings,” Kubrick said. “Every drill instructor has his own encyclopedia of insults for every occasion and we eventually compiled a 250-page transcript from the six 20-minute improvisations Lee had done.

“We inserted the best lines of this into the script, some of it wonderfully off-the-wall stuff like, ‘You’re so ugly you could be a modern art masterpiece.’ ”

For a third of the movie, Matthew Modine, the star of “Birdy” and this film, looks like a plucked bird, shaven to his scalp like the other grunts. He has next to no dialogue, since Parris Island recruits are forbidden to talk with each other during their six weeks’ indoctrination. Such deprivation only intensifies his macho sensitivity.

Cast as Pvt. Joker, Modine plays a cynical Marine whose “Born to Kill” helmet logo and “Peace” button sum up the irreconcilable aims of an unwinnable war. Said Kubrick of the actor: “He’s the kind of baby Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda might have had.”

A director known for an eclectic mix of music in his films, Kubrick mixes Nancy Sinatra and Sam the Sham on the sound track along with “The Marines’ Hymn.” But the strangest sound of all is that supplied by composer Abigail Mead, whose first film score this is. She performed it on a Fairlight music computer, as Kubrick wished “to avoid any prior musical associations that conventional orchestra instruments might bring.”

Like all good line commanders, the director accompanied his men into battle, crouch-running with a Steadicam and sometimes kicking it to give a “stumblecam” effect. He wryly admitted that his emphasis on realism led to at least one unwelcome intrusion.

To film a dramatic sniping, he reluctantly had to include a concrete monolith looming over the slaughter, apprehensive that some film buff relate it to the haunting monolith in “2001” that appeared and vanished at moments of metaphysical change.

At the suggestion that the symbol might encourage critical hypothesis, Kubrick fixed his interrogator with the 1,000-yard stare of a Marine gunnery instructor. “Critical irrelevance, you mean!” he snapped. And the words hit with full-jacketed impact.