Leon Vitali

Matthew Modine Shares Stories About the Making of ‘Full Metal Jacket’

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

Full Metal Jacket Matthew Modine

While moderating a Q&A session with Leon Vitali and Tony Zierra about “Filmworker” at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles, actor Matthew Modine shared some stories about the making of Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket.” In the 1987 war film, Modine plays Private Joker, one of a dozen soldiers who endure Marine Corp basic training under the brutal and abrasive instruction of their drill instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (the late R. Lee Ermey). Following graduation, he heads to South Vietnam to work as a war correspondent for the Stars & Stripes newspaper, and it is there he witnesses the atrocities of war up close. The question is, how much of his humanity can hold onto in the face of death and destruction?

The stories of Kubrick’s behavior and work ethic have long since become legendary in regards to the methods he used to get an actor into a specific emotional state and the number of takes he puts his cast through. The first story Modine shared with us about Kubrick, however, proved to be a bit unexpected.

“Stanley liked to carry a walkie talkie because he wanted to be a part of every aspect of the filmmaking,” Modine said. “Why shouldn’t he have a walkie talkie and know what the assistant directors were saying and what kind of movements were happening? We broke for lunch and the assistant director, Terry Needham, got a call from Stanley, and Stanley asked Terry to come over here. Terry said, ‘Okay, but where is here?’ He said, ‘I’m over here,’ and Terry said come out of the tent where we were having lunch. Terry didn’t want to say on the radio that he was stuck in the portapotty. He couldn’t get the door open. So that’s just a little window into a different part of Stanley that doesn’t appear in the documentary.”

During the Q&A, we learned how the crew on a Kubrick film was actually very small, and the one on “Full Metal Jacket” totaled about 15 people. Vitali even said there was only one electrician, and his job was simly operate the lights on a dimmer. Modine ended up adding a nice bit of trivia to this story.

“The one electrician that we had working on the film, because of the union, he would come in and turn the lights on, and then Stanley would tell him to fuck off to his house because there was some wiring problem in his house,” Modine said. “He had to pay him for the day so he said go wire my house.”

Perhaps the most bizarre and hilarious story Modine shared with us was when he talked about Dorian Harewood who played Eightball, the soldier who experiences an especially brutal and bloody death which is captured in slow motion. The way this scene was shot, however, makes sense when Modine discussed what Harewood demanded from Kubrick.

“Dorian Harewood is a wonderful actor,” Modine said. “We were originally contracted for about six months I think, and the contracts were coming to an end. So they wanted to renegotiate the contracts, and it wasn’t a renegotiation. It was just a reupping to continue the contracts for a longer period of time, and Dorian came to Stanley and said, ‘I want to renegotiate. I want more money,” and Stanley couldn’t believe the audacity of this young guy. He’s like, ‘You’re working for Stanley Kubrick and you are asking me to pay you more money?’ And he (Harewood) said, ‘Well yeah, I have to go back to Los Angeles. I have a singing career, I have an acting career, there’s other jobs, and if you want me to stay here, you’re gonna have to pay for it.’ Stanley couldn’t believe it, and I remember him stumbling around for hours furious with that crazy look on his face, and then he turned and he said, ‘I’m gonna kill him!’ I really thought, oh fuck, Stanley’s gonna commit murder. He’s going to kill Dorian Harewood. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He goes, ‘I’m going to kill him.’ Remember when Dorian gets shot all over the body? It was because however number of days were left upon Dorian Harewood’s contract, Stanley was going to put in all the bullet hits he could. It was really cold. You could see Stanley wearing that hat and two coats, and we were wearing Vietnam khakis. It was freezing cold and snowing in London, and we were dressed up for North Vietnam. He killed him for as many days left that he had on the contract, and he had five days left lying on the cold earth with bullet hits. He (Stanley) would say, ‘Nah, we have to do it again. Put more bullet hits on him.’ And they were full loads full of exploding blood and everything.”

It was great to hear Matthew Modine share his stories about “Full Metal Jacket” as it remains one of Kubrick’s most memorable films. Many critics have called it the best war film ever made, and it features images which are impossible to forget. The actor also left us with something he wanted to share with all the directors in the audience.

“My favorite direction from a director ever was from Stanley Kubrick,” Modine said. “He would clear his throat and pull on his beard and say, ‘Matthew, you’re not going to do it that way, are you?’ It’s my favorite direction because it’s so specific.”

In 2005, Modine published “Full Metal Jacket Diary,” a collection of photographs he took and of diary entries of his experiences which he kept during filming. Please click here to get more information about it.

Full Metal Jacket movie poster

Leon Vitali Talks About Stanley Kubrick and ‘Filmworker’ at Nuart Theatre

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

Leon Vitali on set with Kubrick

Leon Vitali was the guest of honor at the Nuart Theatre on Friday, May 18, 2018 where the documentary “Filmworker” was being shown. Directed by Tony Zierra, it chronicles how Vitali went from being a successful British actor to becoming Stanley Kubrick’s personal assistant after starring in “Barry Lyndon,” and of the intense dedication he gave to the filmmaker’s work from “The Shining” to “Eyes Wide Shut.” Vitali was greeted with a much-deserved standing ovation as he made his way to the stage for a Q&A. Joining him were Zierra and actor Matthew Modine who played Joker in “Full Metal Jacket.”

Modine remarked about a scene which was cut out of “Filmworker” where he said “Stanley stood on Leon’s shoulders” and how much of a marriage Leon and Stanley’s working relationship was, and he described it as being “at times dysfunctional” and “lovely in a British way.” Zierra was actually working on another documentary about Kubrick called “SK13” when he met Vitali, and he said talking with Vitali was a must as it was well-known how he was one of Kubrick’s closest associates. Zierra managed to track him down in Culver City and met with him, and what resulted was this documentary which was filmed over three and a half years.

Tony Zierra photo

“This is the worst nightmare for a filmmaker that when you are really super independent you pick up another documentary and you can’t even finish one,” Zierra said. “I went back and told my producer and partner, Elizabeth Yoffe, this is the most amazing story and I have to do a documentary about this guy, but I’m not sure if I really want to take on another project. But then I remember she said to me you are going to regret it if you don’t do it, so I went back and I asked him, and he said no. And I realized that Leon is just not used to talking about himself. He can talk about Kubrick forever, so it was quite difficult.”

Zierra then remarked how he and Vitali eventually “broke the ice” when he volunteered to organize the heaps of notebooks and materials Vitali had kept over the years while working for Kubrick. As we see in “Filmworker,” Vitali has a huge collection which really does deserve an exhibit of its own.

Modine talked about the overall crew numbers on a Kubrick film and illustrated just how important Vitali was to the famed filmmaker. In the process, he revealed something very surprising as Kubrick’s movies have such an epic look about them to where it looked like hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people worked for him. But as life often teaches us, looks can be deceiving.

Full Metal Jacket Matthew Modine

“(People) imagine the enormity of Stanley Kubrick’s legend is that he was a filmmaker who must’ve had hundreds of people working for him, and it was quite the contrary,” Modine said. “Leon really did wear 100 different hats because when you went to work there was sometimes, when we were filming on the stage, maybe it felt like 15 people working on the film. What I feel is that Stanley Kubrick created an environment for himself to be able to keep production costs down to the minimum so that he could have the ability to work for an extended period of time to do as many takes as were necessary. But in fact, he was probably the most independent filmmaker I’ve ever worked with.”

“That’s absolutely true,” Vitali responded. “The crew on ‘Full Metal Jacket’ ended up looking like a well-crewed student film, you know? We had one electrician, that was it, because he shot so much of it in natural light. And any light he did have, it was a bank of lights like in the barracks for instance that just went up and down on a dimmer. So, he was always conscious about getting every single dollar on the screen. It was the most important thing to him.”

Leon Vitali in Filmworker

Vitali did share stories about Kubrick which involved him calling Vitali a certain word which has a broader meaning in England and Scotland but a simpler one in America as many find it extremely offensive (hint: it begins wit a c and ends with a t), and he also talked about the pie fight scene which was taken out of “Dr. Strangeglove” because they just felt it would have been a terrible way to end the movie. In terms of filmmakers today who Vitali considers in Kubrick’s league, he said he really admires Paul Thomas Anderson, Guillermo Del Toro because he gets back to the fairy tale part of the storytelling, and Sean Baker who directed “The Florida Project.” In terms of his favorite Kubrick movie, he said if you put a gun to his head he would have to say it is “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

One of the most interesting moments of the evening, however, came when Modine asked Vitali what an artist is and what value art and movies have.

“Artist has become a word like love or hate, and it’s used so loosely I think” Vitali said. “To me, anyone can be an artist. In my vacation time from drama school, I used to work with a brick layer, and I eventually saw the way he worked with the bricks. He was an artist at what he did. I’ve seen car mechanics who find their way around because it’s all a process of elimination. I think an artist’s work is a process of elimination because the hardest thing to do is to get back to simplicity of whatever it is you are trying to tell or the story you are trying to tell, and how often things come in which seem like good ideas but they are big distractions. So, you are all the time working to get rid of the junk, however appealing it might seem at the time. Composers and musicians and actors or any of those, they are all artists because that’s what they do. It’s getting everything down to the simplest that you can make it to make the story resonate and have a point. That’s what I think anyway.”

“Filmworker” is an absolute must see for Stanley Kubrick fans, and it is now playing at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles through May 24th.

Filmworker poster

Photos, poster and trailer courtesy of Kino Lorber.

‘Filmworker’ Serves as a Love Letter to Stanley Kubrick’s Right-Hand Man

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

Filmworker poster

It has been almost 20 years since Stanley Kubrick passed away, but his presence is still deeply felt among cinephiles. Some may say this is because “2001: A Space Odyssey” is being re-released in honor of its 50th anniversary, but it goes much further than that. Kubrick had a singular vision, and stories of his directorial methods, such as getting an actor to do dozens upon dozens of takes of a single scene, remain legendary as only a handful of filmmakers could have gotten away with this. And as the documentary “Room 237” showed, people continue to share their interpretations of “The Shining” and of the meanings they believe certain images in it have. Indeed, Kubrick’s films had a large degree of ambiguity in them, and watching them just once is never enough.

But just when you thought you had heard every story about Kubrick, along comes Tony Zierra’s documentary “Filmworker” which looks at the life and times of Kubrick’s right-hand man, Leon Vitali. As an actor, he worked a lot in British television, but after appearing in Kubrick’s film “Barry Lyndon,” he dedicated his life to helping the famed director any which way he could. What results is a movie about working with such a meticulous human being, and of the overall effects it had on Vitali to where it is shocking to see he is still above ground.

“Filmworker” starts with a look at Vitali’s early life as an actor, and it shows how o often he worked in British television and movies to where he was never ever lacking for a job, a position I and my actor friends get to enjoy at some point in this lifetime. Then he got the role of Lord Bullingdon in “Barry Lyndon,” and this introduced the actor to the Kubrick life he was quick to embrace. In a scene where Ryan O’Neal ends up punching Vitali in the back, O’Neal says Kubrick told him, “You’re not hitting him hard enough.” From there, they did the scene 30 more times, and it served as Vitali’s introduction to Kubrick’s obsessive nature in getting things just right down to the smallest of details.

It is very easy to see why Vitali became such a die-hard Kubrick fan after he watched “2001” and “A Clockwork Orange.” Both films reflected a singular vision no other director could have conjured, and Vitali remarked how “2001” dared to have no dialogue in its first 20 minutes, something which seems unthinkable in this day and age. Following their collaboration on “Barry Lyndon,” Kubrick sent him a copy of Stephen King’s “The Shining” to see if it would be worth turning into a movie. Once Vitali told Kubrick it was, the director brought him on so he could search for the perfect child actor to play Danny Torrance. From there, he abandoned his acting career and dedicated his life to Kubrick all the way through his last movie, “Eyes Wide Shut.”

Vitali ended up doing just about every kind of job for Kubrick including casting director, acting coach, location scout, sound engineer and color corrector to name a few. Upon Kubrick’s passing, he became the only person to restore his films. To say he dedicated his life to Kubrick’s work would be the understatement of the millennium. We watch as he works tirelessly to get all the details right, and we see the toll it takes on him and his body. He speaks of how he worked two 36-hour shifts on one project and of how he slept on the floor to catch a two-hour nap while fully dressed so that, when he woke up, he could get right back to work.

Watching “Filmworker,” I wasn’t always sure if I should thank Vitali for all the work he has done or pity him. Some describe him as Igor to Kubrick’s Dr. Frankenstein. I prefer to see him as Waylon Smithers to Kubrick’s Mr. Burns. This man gave up a thriving acting career to work for the director of “Dr. Strangeglove,” and their relationship certainly had a bit of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to it. Vitali shows us the note Kubrick wrote to him in thanks for his work on “Barry Lyndon,” and he remarks at how his first handshake with the filmmaker proved to be “very warm.” But once they began working on “Full Metal Jacket,” Vitali admitted he came to see another side of Kubrick, one which few others got to see up close.

Many like to talk about the Stanley Kubrick they met and of how he was so different compared to all the rumors which were circulating throughout Hollywood about him, but Vitali makes it abundantly clear how he knew Kubrick in a way no one else could. At one point, he even describes Kubrick as the film industry’s equivalent to Gordon Ramsey, the chef from “Hell’s Kitchen” and a man who is always in serious need of anger management classes. People keep asking Vitali how he handled Kubrick, but he responds to this by saying he never handled him but instead handled himself so that he could exist in Kubrick’s world.

Actors like Matthew Modine, Danny Lloyd and the late R. Lee Ermey are interviewed at length here, and they have great stories to share about both Kubrick and Vitali. Lloyd and Ermey credit Vitali for helping them with their performances in a way no one else could, and Modine remarks at how selfless Vitali is when it comes to his work for Kubrick. Modine is just one of several individuals who freely admit they are too selfish to dedicate their lives to Kubrick the way Vitali did. O’Neal goes out of his way to say he “fled” the set of “Barry Lyndon” once his work there was done as he was terrified of being subjected to reshoots.

Indeed, the level of dedication Vitali gives Kubrick is both commendable and scary. You also have to feel for him as he suffers under the heavy hand of Warner Brothers while working to give Kubrick’s films the attention they deserved. I remember when the first DVD’s of his work came out and how bad they were, and Vitali spent his precious time getting the color just right. Hearing how Kubrick got incensed if the green was off reminded me of Robin Williams in “One Hour Photo” when his character of Sy went off at a repairman for not taking a difference of three points in color all that seriously. If you are passionate enough about something, you will see it through to the very last detail.

As you can imagine, there is a good deal of trivia about Kubrick on display here. Among the most interesting bits come from Ermey who played Gunnery Sargent Hartman in “Full Metal Jacket” as he discusses how he went about getting actors for the movie, and it is eerie to see him describe what the movie did for his career and of how he has led a great life as it was only a few weeks ago he died due to complications from pneumonia. We also get to hear from Tim Colceri who was originally cast as Hartman before being replaced by Ermey. He ended up playing the doorgunner who shoots away at any and every Vietnamese individual regardless of whether or not they are the “enemy.” Watching Colceri’s face as he reflects on the role he could have had is heartbreaking as his disappointment looks to last a lifetime.

In a lot of ways, “Filmworker” serves as a love letter to Vitali as his work on Kubrick’s films is extraordinary, and we should be thankful for what he has done as this documentary shows how no one else could have preserved the iconic director’s work the way he has. But beyond that, it also acts as a love letter to those who work tirelessly behind the scenes on film sets as they often do not get the respect they deserve. To many, they simply appear as names on a movie’s end credits, and some of those credits move at lightning speed when those movies are shown on the Sundance Channel. But after watching this documentary, we have every reason to thank Vitali for his devotion to Kubrick as, without him, no one could have been able to give “Eyes Wide Shut” the release it deserved. But more importantly, it provides Vitali with the happy ending he has long since earned.

While watching “Filmworker,” I was reminded of what Homer Simpson told his family while they watched the end credits for “The Simpsons Movie:”

“A lot of people worked hard on this film, and all they ask is for you to memorize their names!”

This is, of course, completely unrealistic, but when it comes to “Filmworker,” I want to believe such a thing could be possible.

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