The pair came across Gustav Hasford‘s novel “ The Short-Timers,” and decided to adapt that instead, with Hasford working on the screenplay along with them. It was in this context, shortly before the release of “The Shining,” that Kubrick contacted Michael Herr, who’d been the war correspondent for Esquire magazine in Vietnam, and written the acclaimed memoir of his time there, 1977’s “ Dispatches.” Kubrick wanted Herr’s opinion on whether an adaptation of historian Raul Hilberg‘s seminal “ The Destruction Of The European Jews” could work, but talk soon turned to Vietnam.
As far back as 1976, Kubrick was starting to think about a Holocaust film, attempting to get Nobel Prize-wining Jewish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer (“ Enemies: A Love Story“) to write a script for him. Kubrick had already made one of the all-time great war movies with “ Paths Of Glory,” and indeed, when he first started thinking about a new project after “ The Shining,” the director wasn’t intending to make a film in the same genre as his earlier Kirk Douglas-starrer.
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Read on for more.ġ) The film began from the seeds of a Holocaust movie that Kubrick wanted to make. To commemorate both, as well as the release of the film 25-and-a-bit years ago, we’ve gathered up five things you might not know about Kubrick’s Vietnam classic. But that’s not all for Kubrickphiles, as Matthew Modine, the film’s star, put out a new iPad app today that sees the actor narrate the photos and journals he kept, at Kubrick’s encouragement, throughout the making of the movie. Released 25 years ago, today sees the arrival of a new anniversary Blu-Ray of the film.
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Full of unforgettable sequences and typically pitch-perfect filmmaking, it’s somehow less talked about than some of Kubrick’s pictures, but certainly remains one of his most powerful and brilliant films. Marines as they are pushed through basic training by their sadistic drill sergeant, and shipped out to Vietnam.
Profane, profound and endlessly influential on war movies to come (it features an early use of the shutter-speed effect that Steven Spielberg would later make popular with “ Saving Private Ryan“), the film, quite unlike anything else that Kubrick ever made, follows a group of aspiring U.S. And sandwiched between 1980’s “ The Shining” and 1999’s posthumously-released “ Eyes Wide Shut” was his Vietnam war epic “ Full Metal Jacket.”
Stanley Kubrick was never the most prolific of filmmakers, but his productivity slowed right down in the last couple of decades of his life while there were several projects he worked on that never got made, including “ Napoleon” and “ A.I.,” the director only made three films in the last twenty years of his career.