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When considering the most memorable Kubrick characters, several names come to mind.
But perhaps none have invited more empathy from the audience than poor Leonard Lawrence
in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (given the nickname Gomer Pyle early on in the film).
From now on, you’re Gomer Pyle!
Sir, yes, sir!
The role of Private Pyle would be played by a
newcomer to the film world named Vincent D’Onofrio.
You’re probably aware of D’Onofrio’s strong career following Full Metal Jacket–
delivering great performances in Steal This Movie, The Cell,
and Men in Black, to name a few of my personal favorites.
Figures.
D’Onofrio got his start in the theater. He had appeared in “community-theater productions”
while attending the University of Colorado and afterward, he [quote] “studied method
acting at the American Stanislavsky Theater and the Actors Studio” (D'Onofrio Wiki). He
appeared in several off-Broadway productions “including Of Mice and Men”
and it was around this time that he first met fellow actor Matthew Modine,
who would play Private Joker in the film (D'Onofrio Wiki, FMJ Making).
They met while auditioning for a movie called Private School
and the two would become good friends while going on auditions together (FMJ Diary).
D’Onofrio continued acting in NYU “student productions” and performed in the broadway
show Open Admissions all while working as a bouncer at the Hard Rock Cafe (D'Onofrio Wiki).
But a chance encounter in Times Square would launch D’Onofrio into a film career
that would begin with one of cinema’s greatest performances
under arguably the biggest name in film–Stanley Kubrick.
This is the story of how a newcomer to the film world created one of Kubrick’s best characters.
Matthew Modine had already made his transition to film with John Sayles Baby It’s You and after
a few roles in other movies, he was hired to star opposite Nicolas Cage in Birdy directed by
Alan Parker (Modine Wiki). During the production, Modine went out to dinner in New York City and saw
Val Kilmer angrily staring at him from across the room (Den of Geek). Modine went over to see what
was up and found that Kilmer was annoyed because he heard that Modine had been cast in Stanley
Kubrick’s new movie about the Vietnam War (Den of Geek). This was news to Modine, but he thought
that he might as well audition. It turns out that Kubrick had been interested in Modine and had Alan
Parker send him a scene from Birdy. After Kubrick hired Modine to play Private Joker, he would later
reveal that the clips that Parker sent almost ruined his chances for the role (FMJ Diary).
I can’t get you the car back, even if I wanted to!
So tell me the man’s name and I’ll get it back!
Shut up, you skinny bucket of piss!
Kubrick told Modine, “I couldn’t tell anything about you as an actor from the scene he chose.
It was just two actors demonstrating that they could scream” (FMJ Diary). However,
there was a bit at the end of the tape, when the screaming was over,
that you could see a quiet non-speaking moment of Modine acting. This is what won him the part.
It was shortly after this that Modine and his wife were walking around Times Square
and just happened to run into D’Onofrio who was working the door at the Hard Rock Cafe.
D’Onofrio: “Him and his wife were passing by and they saw me at the front door and we
talked and he said ‘I’m off doing this thing with Stanley Kubrick’ and I’m like ‘wow' and
he said 'you know there’s another part that they haven’t cast yet. I don’t know what it is,
because he doesn’t let us see it, but you should go up for it.’ And he gave me the address to send
a tape to. So my friend and I, Steve, we went to—I was doing a play at the time—and
we went to a stoop on 10th avenue and 24th street, and
we rented one of these, you know the cameras were like huge back then, it had a deck—”
Maron: “Oh right the video cameras, yeah yeah yeah.”
D’Onofrio: “Huge! And I mean like, you know, the size bigger than your computer.
And so we rented all that, and I put on beta, like 3,
like 3 or 4 takes, I just did 3, 4 monologues in a row, and I, the tape was huge and—”
Maron: “What were the monologues?”
Vincent D’Onofrio: “From the play that I was doing.”
Maron: “Oh ok.”
D’Onofrio: “And then I sent it to Stanley Kubrick.”
The monologue was from a scene that was talking about the police, but D’Onofrio removed the
references to the police so that it just sounded like it had a military essence (Pollak Interview).
Kubrick took Modine into a room in his house with thousands of VHS tapes of auditions saying,
“this is the room with only the good auditions” (FMJ Diary). At this point, Kubrick had every
role cast except for Private Pyle. Modine saw his opportunity and suggested D’Onofrio (FMJ Diary).
D’Onofrio: “You know, I got this call directly from this guy who said he was
Stanley Kubrick’s assistant, and I’m like ‘Ok, ok.’ And then Stanley gets on the phone and
I thought that he was British,
like I didn’t know that he was from the Bronx, I didn’t know enough about him. I’d seen all his
movies but I didn’t know anything about him. And so, soon as he said hello I just fuckin’ hung up.”
Pollack: “Did you?”
D’Onofrio: “Yeah, I thought it was so stupid, like—”
Pollack: “Who did you think it was?”
D’Onofrio: “One of my bouncer friends, fuckin’ around.”
They called back and said, “please don’t hang up” and ended up sending
him some lines to record on tape and send back (Pollak Interview). D’Onofrio said,
“well, you know, it costs a lot of money to rent these cameras and stuff”
and Kubrick replied, “Oh, I’ll send you some money too” (Pollak Interview).
D’Onofrio: “I was thinking ‘Well this is amazing, I’m never going to get this,
but it’s amazing that I’m talking to this guy. But I can’t...like,
life doesn’t work this way. And that I’ll do everything he says, but I’m a bouncer that
does theater, at the time. And I couldn’t––I was too young and naive to see anything past that.”
D’Onofrio called it a “surreal experience” because he was studying acting, but his only real goal was
to not “get laughed off stage” and potentially starring in a Kubrick movie was so far beyond
that (Pollak Interview). D’Onofrio said about that phone-call, “I sussed out that [the character]
was a weak-minded individual. And [Kubrick] told me, with no detail in a kind of roundabout way,
it was like a puzzle I had to put together with what he was saying to me,
but he said that the guy is weak-minded, he has to be overweight, you’re gonna have to put on weight,
and he’s struggling because it’s an environment that he really shouldn’t be in” (WTF).
About a week later, D’Onofrio received a manilla envelope with a letter containing just some
lines–no punctuation or anything--and the letter just said to do it on camera (Pollak Interview).
D’Onofrio said, “They were pieces and fragments of things that sort of ended up in the movie, and
then most didn’t” (WTF). He performed the lines, which he said seemed like a boot camp thing,
in front of a fence in his backyard and sent the tape to Kubrick (Pollak Interview). He had gained
“5 or 6 pounds” and did the lines without a shirt on to show that he was gaining weight (WTF). The
next call he received was Kubrick asking him to come to England (Pollak Interview).
The funny thing was that in that phone call, D’Onofrio told Kubrick that he didn’t have
an agent and Kubrick told him pretty much “that’s easy, just tell an agency
that you’ve been cast in a Kubrick movie and you’ll get one” (Pollak Interview).
Modine told D’Onofrio to pick up The Short-Timers–the book that the movie
would be based on (Commentary). In the book, the Pyle character is thin and frail, but Kubrick
wanted the character to be fat, so in that phone call, he told D’Onofrio to start gaining weight
because he was probably going to have to gain “20 or 30 pounds” (Commentary, WTF). He gained
the weight, but when he arrived in England and met with Kubrick,
Kubrick said that he “just looked like [he] could kick everyone’s ass” and he would have to
gain more (WTF). He had about six months to gain enough weight to look weak, so he would just eat
tons of carbs–like a “half a loaf of bread for breakfast”–and the more weight he gained, the
more people began treating him differently (WTF). He said he had no more romantic life and he was
surprised that people started treating him like he was stupid just for being overweight (WTF).
D’Onofrio would end up gaining 70 to 80 pounds–
more than Robert De Niro’s 60-pound weight gain for Raging Bull (Den of Geek). D’Onofrio went from
200 pounds to almost 280 pounds before he was ready to play Pyle (FMJ Making).
He said that it was such a strange and drastic change from how he normally looked.
Here is what he looked like in Adventures in Babysitting,
which was released in the same year as Full Metal Jacket.
Thor!
Who is this kid?
He said that he didn’t fully feel like Pyle until he got his head shaved,
which is why he couldn’t wait to do this shot (Commentary).
So, I guess we’re actually able to see D’Onofrio getting into character here.
He also said his friends were embarrassed by his smirking face when they first saw the movie
before they realized it was part of the character (Commentary).
Over the course of the bootcamp half of the movie, we witness a variety
of incidents and montages of Pyle slowly being driven toward his breaking point. He
can’t do anything right and he is constantly being singled out, humiliated, and abused.
What’s interesting is that there is a 9-and-a-half hour story over three Japanese movies from 1959
called The Human Condition that has a section that is very similar to Pyle’s story in Full Metal Jacket.
The Human Condition is incredible and stars Tatsuya Nakadai; the guy from Sword of Doom.
I’m going to spoil a small part of the trilogy, which I kind of already did by saying it is
similar to Full Metal Jacket, but anyway, if you want to skip this part go to this timestamp.
The story follows a Japanese pacifist who gets swept up by the horror and brutality
of World War II-era Japan and tries to survive without losing his soul. The
connection to Full Metal Jacket comes in the second part, called Road to Eternity.
At this point in the story, our hero, Kaji,
has been forced into the army where he meets Obara, a weakling with bad eyesight.
Obara is punished when a cigarette butt was found in a water tank after he was on duty.
Kaji sticks up for him, but he is punished too.
Obara’s wife is taking care of his mother and she is threatening to leave.
He accidentally breaks a piece of a fellow recruit’s rifle and is smacked around for it.
It goes on and on until their final march during basic training.
Obara can’t hack it and Kaji helps him, but when he can’t go on–even Kaji lashes out.
He is abused for not being able to finish and the rest of the recruits beat him and humiliate him.
Unable to take it anymore, Obara goes to the bathroom and shoots himself.
It’s hard to say if there is a connection between the two stories–
The Human Condition came out in 1959 and The Short-Timers came out in 1979. Of course,
Kubrick would take a different approach than Kobayashi did in The Human Condition–
Obara couldn’t handle the brutality of life in the Japanese army, but Kubrick’s approach to Pyle
is more like a monster–a weak-minded person who is turned into a killer and then kills his creator.
Now, you might be interested in checking out The Human Condition, but 9-and-half hours? Well,
this episode’s bonus content is a PDF with a spoiler-free article with a lot
of interesting behind the scenes stories that I hope will pique your interest in checking
it out. It’s just a dollar and really helps the channel or you can support me on Patreon
at the $5 level to get access to this and all of the other bonus material I’ve made.
You’ll notice that there is a lot of real slapping going on
in The Human Condition-–Full Metal Jacket would get some real slapping as well.
What side was that, Private Pyle?!
Sir, left side, sir!
Are you sure, Private Pyle?!
Earlier, they had filmed the scene where Joker says that he doesn’t believe in the Virgin Mary
and Hartman slaps him before promoting him to squad leader. Lee Ermey was apparently not very
good at aiming and would sometimes accidentally slap Modine for real.
Kubrick would watch the playback and say that it “looked like a miss”
even though Ermey made contact (FMJ Diary). They did the slap over and over for two days,
but both the hits and the misses didn’t look right to Kubrick. He changed the angle
and they did the scene “a couple dozen more times” and he thought it still looked weird,
so he went back to the original position (FMJ Diary). Then Ermey accidentally [quote] “[slapped]
the shit out of [Modine]” and Kubrick still thought it “looked like a miss” (FMJ Diary).
So when it came time for Pyle to get slapped, D’Onofrio told Ermey to slap him for real and
told Kubrick what Ermey was going to do (FMJ Diary). Ermey slapped him hard and they moved on.
D’Onofrio: “I remember putting my hat on very loosely on my head,
for this, the slap. I figured it would sell the slap better if the hat spun.
I didn’t know it was going to come though, but I guess he used the one that came off.”
Pyle is often yelled at and abused for making mistakes, but much of the time, he is singled
out just because of the way he looks. In the first scene, Pyle is literally choked because of the way
his face looks and much of the difficulties he has is due to him being overweight.
The Human Condition and The Short-Timers feature characters who are thin and frail,
but I would argue that it can be even more difficult for an overweight person to keep
up with the demands of the basic training we see in the film. The empathy is sort of
baked-in because you can see that he is at a disadvantage compared to the other recruits.
Pyle’s weight has a big impact on his inability to complete tasks as part of his training and
when you see D’Onofrio carrying an extra 70(plus) pounds you can imagine how much
more difficult it must have been for him to do take after take of these training sequences.
Now, the problem with gaining a bunch of weight for a Kubrick movie is that Kubrick tended to
have long shoots, so D’Onofrio would have to not only keep the weight on for a long time,
but he had no idea how long that would end up being (FMJ Making). If you’ve seen my video on
Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, you’ll know that, at one point, Ermey was in a terrible car
accident and the production had to go on hiatus for “four and a half months” (Cahill). Well,
D’Onofrio had to keep the weight on that entire time and it began to take a toll on his body.
On January 16th, 1986, during one shot of the training montage for the boot camp sequence–
this shot in particular–Pyle was supposed to be unable to get over the obstacle
and during one of the times D’Onofrio fell to the ground he landed wrong and badly injured his
knee (Commentary, FMJ Diary). D’Onofrio thinks that this was the actual take when it happened
and you can see that, directly after he falls, the camera cuts to a slightly different angle.
He did this shot only twice before having to go to the hospital, so it’s likely that we’re watching
the second take and then it cuts to the end of the first take after the injury (Commentary).
As it turns out, the extra weight that D’Onofrio wasn’t used to caused him to tear ligaments in
his knee requiring surgery to fix (Den of Geek). After a few days, he was back on the set,
but had to wear a knee brace for the rest of the shoot (FMJ Diary). While he was resting,
D’Onofrio watched them film the sniper death scene on a soundstage (Commentary).
During this shot of Joker helping Pyle run, he is wearing a knee brace under his pants and
lumbering along--the sweat is just water that was sprayed on his sweatshirt (Commentary).
The fuckin’ war will be over by the time we get up there, won’t it, Private Pyle?!
Kubrick movies often feature a character who rebels against their creator or circumstance
but never has such a character invited so much empathy. Pyle was completely innocent
throughout his story and you could argue that Hartman should have been responsible enough to
see the road that Pyle was going down, but such is life in a Kubrick film–the ambiguity is what
makes it so interesting. It’s one thing to have a character’s natural killer-instincts brought out,
but Pyle was a completely harmless person who was slowly transformed into a monster.
Tune in next time when we will talk about Pyle’s descent into madness, how a rift between Vincent
D’Onofrio and Matthew Modine created a lot of tension on the set, how Kubrick directed the
‘Kubrick-Stare’, and how D’Onofrio used monster movies to shape his performance.
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