Full Metal Jacket's famous quotes: the drill sergeant improvised much of his
Stanley Kubrick scripted every syllable and shot forty takes of it. The one performer he let off that leash was a consultant he hadn't hired to act, and the result is the most quoted half hour in his filmography.
Kubrick did not permit improvisation. He made precisely one exception across his entire career, and it produced the thirty minutes of dialogue people still recite forty years on.
R. Lee Ermey was not hired to play Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. He was brought onto Full Metal Jacket as a technical adviser, because he had actually done the job: he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1961 at seventeen, served as a drill instructor from 1965 to 1967, did fourteen months in Vietnam in 1968 and left as a staff sergeant. The part had gone to Tim Colceri.
How he took the role off the man who had it
Ermey filmed himself drilling the extras being considered for background parts, ad-libbing abuse at them for the camera as a demonstration reel. Kubrick watched it and changed his mind about who should be playing Hartman. Colceri was moved to the door gunner in the film's second half — which is how he ended up delivering "Get some! Get some!", the other line from this film that everybody can quote.
Kubrick still made him earn it. His assistant Leon Vitali threw tennis balls and oranges at Ermey while he ran his lines, and Ermey had to catch them, throw them back and keep the delivery at full speed without dropping a beat. He got through it on the twentieth attempt.
Ermey later described Vitali, who was pitching the fruit, as "my drill instructor."
The lines
Hartman's material is the most-quoted block of dialogue in Kubrick's filmography, and over half of it is Ermey's own writing:
- "I am Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, your senior drill instructor." — the opening, and the only calm sentence he gets.
- "You are nothing but unorganized, grab-asstic pieces of amphibian shit." — thirty seconds into the film.
- "I will unscrew your head and shit down your neck."
- "I will PT you until your assholes are sucking buttermilk."
- "You will not laugh. You will not cry. You will learn by the numbers."
- "Only steers and queers come from Texas." — the Texas exchange, which runs on for a full minute.
- "What is your major malfunction?" — the one that outlived the film entirely.
Two of the most recited passages are not Ermey's at all. "This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine" is the Rifleman's Creed, written by Major General William H. Rupertus in 1942 and recited by Marines for decades before Kubrick filmed it. Private Pyle's "I am in a world of shit" belongs to Vincent D'Onofrio, in the sequence that closes the first half.
Three takes
The improvisation is the headline, but the shooting speed is the more revealing statistic. Kubrick was notorious for running past forty takes on a single line. Ermey regularly satisfied him inside three.
Writing, editing and improvising his own dialogue was a freedom Kubrick extended to no other performer in any of his films.
Ermey was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor and spent the next three decades being cast as authority figures on the strength of it. He received an honorary promotion to gunnery sergeant — his character's rank — from the Marine Corps in 2002, and died on 15 April 2018, aged 74.
For the record: the audition tape that got him the part has never surfaced. The single most consequential piece of footage in the film's production history is lost.