Had Lou Gossett Jr not won the Oscar for An Officer and a Gentleman, Lee would have won for that performance. I mean, Lee was a drill instructor, so there was a natural ability, but he didn’t have the training. Leon worked for hundreds of hours with Lee to turn him into that character. It’s testament to his direction that you have a character that might normally be considered a bad guy – the drill instructor, played by Lee Ermey – and yet nobody cheers, nobody’s happy, when the drill instructor gets shot and killed, because you know that guy was trying to teach those guys to work together. Stanley was really making a film about the effects of war – what happens when young men who’ve been taught their whole lives to respect life then become killers. Stanley Kubrick working on set in Beckton.

The street fighting, I think, is one of the things that makes the film timeless. It would have been a completely different film if we’d gone to the jungles and shot Vietnam that way. I was never certain why we shot the film backwards, but I knew we had to be out of Beckton gasworks by a certain date because it was scheduled for demolition. We did the Vietnam scenes first, before bootcamp, but they started to overlap, and there was maybe a month where I was wearing a wig, because my head had to be shaved. We shot the battle scenes at Beckton gasworks, London, near the Isle of Dogs. He’s not fat and he’s not southern, but he’s a great actor.’ So Vincent auditioned and Stanley said, “He’s perfect – will he gain the weight?” I said, “That’s up to you guys.” I got to London, and Stanley said, “You know, we have a terrific cast, but I don’t have anybody to play Gomer Pyle.” I said, “I’ve got somebody. I thought Vince was an amazing actor, and I promised to call him if anything came up. Lee came up with, I don’t know, 150 pages of insults,” Kubrick said.I suggested Vincent D’Onofrio join the cast. They didn’t know what he was going to say, and we could see how they reacted. We lined them all up and did an improvisation of the first meeting with the drill instructor. “In the course of hiring the marine recruits, we interviewed hundreds of guys. Kubrick told Rolling Stone that 50 percent of Ermey’s dialogue in the film was his own.

Ermey had been brought on as a technical consultant for the 1987 film, but he had his eyes on the role of the brutal gunnery sergeant and filmed his own audition tape of him yelling out insults while tennis balls flew at him. The part he would become most well-known for, in “Full Metal Jacket,” wasn’t even originally his. He raked in more than 60 credits in film and television across his long career in the industry, often playing authority figures in everything from “Se7en” to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” remake. His first film credit was as a helicopter pilot in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” which was quickly followed by a part in “The Boys in Company C” as a drill instructor. The knowledge of him passing brings back wonderful memories of our time together.”īorn Ronald Lee Ermey in 1944, Ermey served 11 years in the Marine Corps and spent 14 months in Vietnam and then in Okinawa, Japan, where he became staff sergeant. Vincent D’Onofrio added: “Ermey was the real deal.

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