STANLEY KUBRICK'S VIETNAM
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
Published: June 21, 1987
LONDON— THE REASSURING THING about Stanley Kubrick is that after being deep as Yahweh in the creation of one movie for the last five years, he emerges gentle and curious on the seventh day, asking about beer commercials and envying silent film makers and recalling the pleasures of the Thalia.
''Have you seen those Michelob commercials?'' he asks as if they were samizdat, speaking of the 30-second spots that came uninvited with the Giant football game videos that his sister sent the eminent director all last winter from New Jersey. Then, he had no time to spare for watching anything beyond his own work in progress and a weekly fix of football. ''They're just boy-girl, night-fun, leading up to pouring the beer, all in 30 seconds, beautifully edited and photographed. Economy of statement is not something that films are noted for.''
Sunday morning at Pinewood Studios in the London suburbs seems sepulchral in the empty executive offices, as quiet as Hal's deep-space murder scene in ''2001,'' an awful setting to encounter one of a kind. But Mr. Kubrick arrives rumpled and lone as the night watchman, offers a simple hello, accepts the fact that he cannot direct the phone to work properly, and settles down to discuss movies and imagination and his own new work, much as a carpenter would feel the grain of a cabinet. It is his newest making, perchance his best or at least another in his line.
''It starts with being excited by a story and finally it's telling the story on the screen,'' he says, speaking of the process of directing. ''It goes from the most wonderful literary atmosphere to desperation. It can be as crude as standing up and writing on the back of an envelope when someone's just said something and it's 4 o'clock with the winter sun fading. You've got to shoot it and you're trying to exploit something that's just come up. It's like a quarterback calling an automatic play when he sees the defense he's up against.''
His new movie, ''Full Metal Jacket,'' a story hinged on the trauma of the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War, is completed and opens in New York on Friday at neighborhood theaters. Beckton, an old 1930's-gasworks town abandoned on the Thames, has been destroyed by Mr. Kubrick's technical artists, all fiery and pocked as Hue, the Vietnamese city of the movie's climax. The 200 palm trees flown in from Spain to make Vietnam of this sceptered isle have been returned to peacetime. Out on the downs, the Parris Island cadence counting has ceased along with all the lurid, ignoble, cynical and sadly mortal motion of characters directed onto film from the mind of Stanley Kubrick.
The movie is literally only hours old in Mr. Kubrick's finished, perfectionist version, and far from talking 1980's box office or 1960's jabberwocky about his personal agony through the nation's Vietnam experience, Mr. Kubrick is describing being true to the initial emotion that struck him when he first found this story. That was five years ago amid what is the hardest part of directing, he says, searching for a good tale that sustains the imagination.
''The sense of the story the first time you read it is the absolutely critical yardstick. I remember what I felt about the book, I remember what I felt in writing the script, and then I try to keep that alive in the very inappropriate circumstances that exist on a film set where you've got a hundred people standing around and nothing but particular problems, still trying to sustain a subjective sense of what it is emotionally - as well as what it is that pleases you.''
Bearded and staring carefully as a question is asked, Mr. Kubrick speaks with his right hand rubbing his brow, often glancing down, like a man reciting the confiteor or handicapping the next race.
''That first impression is the most precious thing you've got, you can never have it again - the yardstick for any judgment that you have as you get deeper and deeper into the work because making a movie is a process of going into smaller and smaller detail and finally winding up in the minutiae of how does a footstep sound on the sound track when you're remixing the film.''
No, he had no craving to make a signature movie about that war, he says. He was reading the Virginia Kirkus Review, as he usually does, looking for stirring fiction about something, anything that might promise a stunning translation to film and he came upon a novel, ''The Short-Timers.'' He read a copy.
''I reread it almost immediately and I thought, 'This is very exciting, I better think about it for a few days.' But it was immediately apparent that it was a unique, absolutely wonderful book,'' he says about the novel, written by Gustav Hasford, an ex-Marine combat correspondent whose offering resembles a memoir of the pellucid and the ravaged as much as the naked and the dead. The screenplay is by Mr. Kubrick, Mr. Hasford and Michael Herr, author of ''Dispatches,'' a memoir of the Vietnam War.
''Full Metal Jacket'' is a reference in military bureaucratese to the rifle cartridge that is the field ammunition of the basic Marine Corps fighter-killer. The movie is blue with death and madness but also characteristically balletic at times with Mr. Kubrick's forensic eye, particularly in the initial boot camp scenes where men are shaved raw for war. The chorus-type character, Private Joker, played by Matthew Modine, traverses the war diagonally, encompassing the propaganda mill of the combat correspondents and the sudden, all-hands combat duty of the Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese. This is an event that shreds the jingoistic romance of the war and makes an unlikely killer of Joker.
Whether critics judge the film singularly good or bad - never an easy, predictable task for them by the director's track record - at a minimum the movie has been spare and ugly and beautiful by the time its dark sweep is completed from the Marine Hymn to the singing of M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E as Mr. Kubrick's Marines stagger beyond the Tet offensive into nowhere and houselights up.
Mr. Kubrick is such a loner in the film business, not only following the beat of a different drummer but more likely constructing his own drum, that it can only be purest coincidence that his movie has emerged now in the industry's sudden burst of special Vietnam films. It comes close after ''Platoon,'' the well acclaimed standout that he recently saw and liked very much, he says plainly as a fan who loved the Thalia's darkness, apparently devoid of professional envy. Mr. Kubrick shies from talking of what he hopes his movie says; he judges he was typically dubious and critical of the Vietnam War in its day, but he hardly seems the zealot-esthete now having his say about it. His worry about war in conversation is understandably technological from the man who made ''Dr. Strangelove,'' a doubt that nuclear weapons can ever be eliminated and a concern that there is too little negotiation to limit the chances of accidental missile war.
Mr. Kubrick works hermitlike for years on a single picture, searching out a story, writing a script, producing and directing all the way down to, lately, the search for good foreign writers, actors and directors who might not spoil the work for him in the four main movie dubbing markets. His choice of subject matter for a new film is enough to fascinate buffs who have bounded with him across 30 eclectic years from ''Paths of Glory'' to ''Spartacus,'' from ''Lolita'' to ''Dr. Strangelove,'' from ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' to ''A Clockwork Orange,'' from ''Barry Lyndon'' to ''The Shining.''
''I'm happy with the picture,'' he says in this period of pause when he will catch up on 18 months of missed movies, good and bad, and read as ever with the hope of finding another story. ''My films have all had varying critical opinion and it's always been subsequent critical reaction that settles the scores.''
He talks of that more in puzzlement than vindication. ''The only thing I can think of is that everybody's always expecting the last movie again, and they're sometimes angry - I mean some critics - often put off because they're expecting something else.'' He talks of trusting the ''more democratric intelligence'' of the public, a lesson he particularly learned after ''2001'': ''People who didn't have the responsibility of having to explain it or formulate clear statements about it two hours after they saw the film weren't troubled.''
At age 58, Mr. Kubrick has been involved in making movies for 35 years, a physician's son who became a relative adventurer from the Bronx, dropping from formal education to become a photographer for Look magazine, then moving to motion pictures where he has mastered the basic phases from writing to financing and reigns as a bookish autodidact of unpredictable curiosities. He dislikes Los Angeles, feels New York is technically limited for film making and so finds London the place to work and raise his family in satisfying privacy.
''Just keep at it,'' he says of his work habit of plunging into the making of each film, analyzing each approaching day's move well into the night before, much like the masters of Mr. Kubrick's beloved avocation, chess. ''Chess is an analogy - it is a series of steps that you take one at a time and it's balancing resources against the problem, which in chess is time and in movies is time and money,'' he says.
Chess is less creative for him but teaches him not to get carried away with impulsive first ideas. ''I've found over the long period of time which it takes to make a movie that your own sense of whether you think it's good or bad or how happy you are at a particular time is very unimportant, that the ideas just come and sometimes they seem to come out of some place that's got nothing to do with how you feel.''
Mr. Kubrick talks of movies not as Ahab stalks the whale but as a physicist might toss and catch Newton's apple.
''I have a feeling that no one has yet really found the way to tell a story to utilize the greatest potential that films have,'' he says. ''I think the silent movies come closest to it because they weren't trapped in having to present a scene which was essentially a stage type of scene; movies consist of little play scenes.'' He sounds gentle toned, as if he were not discussing the heart of his existence. ''There's a a gap between the guys who can actually write a story and someone who can visualize it, and that's a big gap because even the directors who write, like Woody Allen and Bergman, are very much bound up in the conventions of the stage.''
As he talks, Mr. Kubrick suddenly puts his envy of the silents on a track parallel with his curiosity about the 30-second Michelob spots. ''The best TV commercials create a tremendously vivid sense of a mood, of a complex presentation of something.''
''Some combination of the two might work,'' Mr. Kubrick says, braiding a fantasy that seems to twirl somewhere within. ''I have a feeling that no one has begun to do what a movie could really do.'' His voice has a casual, New York mood, but his eyes reflect a terrible determination.
The director pictures a grainy old fade-in from the silents and he invents a title card: ''Joe's cousin, Bill.'' ''And you just see a shot of Bill doing something,'' he says as a listener lingers wishing that Stanley Kubrick would flesh out Bill. But Bill ceases to exist, with no time for mourning in the run of ideas, as Mr. Kubrick lovingly talks of ''economy of structural statement, the nearest to silent film.'' This is a quality he savored in the Vietnam book in his first reaction, he recalls, and one that in the film he has sought to transfer ''quite literally because the dialogue is so almost poetic in its carved-out, stark quality.''
But this movie is done, and Mr. Kubrick seems not so much depleted or doubting as waiting for the process to turn in his mind all over again, waiting for a story. ''It's the most difficult thing,'' he says, ''A good story is a miraculous discovery.''
Even then he sounds more grateful than plaintive. ''The structure making a movie imposes on your life when you're doing it again feels like it felt each time before,'' Mr. Kubrick says, smiling. ''So there is a kind of wonderful suggestive timelessness about the structure. I'm doing exactly the same as I was doing when I was 18 and making my first movie. It frees you from any other sense of time.''
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