When Matthew Modine was cast as Pvt. Joker, the lead Marine in 1987’s “Full Metal Jacket,” he worried about building a relationship with Stanley Kubrick, the famously intense director more than twice his age. To help, a friend gave Modine a 35mm Rolleiflex camera, a boxy, German-made medium-format model beloved by collectors and movie buffs.

“He thought it could be a cool way of my breaking the ice with Kubrick,” Modine told Variety. “So I taught myself to use it.”

Kubrick was not impressed. As Modine tried to show it off, the film legend called the camera a “piece of shit” and ticked off a specific modern model, specific lenses, and even a camera bag that Modine should buy.

“If you’re going to take pictures on my set, this is the camera you need to get,” Kubrick said.

Those instructions, Modine realized, included an unspoken permission slip: to capture behind-the-scenes pictures of the iconic war film as it was being made (which perhaps made sense for the film: Pvt. Joker, after all, is a combat correspondent in the Marines, and snaps photos throughout).

Modine’s photographs and a journal he kept during the filming are now the heart of “Full Metal Jacket Diary,” an exhibit at the National Veterans Memorial And Museum in Columbus, Ohio. The photographs and other pieces spent much of the year at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia, as the exhibit “Full Metal Modine.”

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Actor Matthew Modine during filming of “Full Metal Jacket.” Modine took dozens of pictures on the set, and kept a journal, which is now a traveling exhibit. Photo courtesy of the National Veterans Memorial and Museum.</figcaption></figure>

Some of the photos captured iconic moments from the film, including a striking image of actor Adam Baldwin as Animal Mother, the ferocious, M60-firing colossus who fights through the City of Huế. Modine’s camera looks up at Baldwin from below, stone-faced and draped in ammunition belts — even as crew member holds a light meter to his face, revealing the terrifying monster that Baldwin creates to be a trick of the camera.  

Others capture the movie’s most famous alum, retired Marine R. Lee Ermey, in his role as a sadistic drill instructor. In one, Ermey reviews a line of “recruits,” a familiar sight in the movie. But in a second shot, Modine found an exhausted-looking Ermey off-set, slightly slumped, and his campaign hat tilted back, like a mask pulled up.

The exhibit at the Ohio museum will remain into February, and perhaps longer, according to Bill Butler, a retired Army colonel and the museum’s acting president. Modine spoke at the exhibit’s opening in November.

“He’s not a veteran, but he’s got older brothers who served in Vietnam,” Butler told Task & Purpose. “His uncles and dad served in World War II. And, you know, he stars in Full Metal Jacket. He stars in Memphis Belle. So he’s got this respect for the military based on his upbringing, and the story that he told just resonated so much with all the combat veterans that were in the audience.”

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Actor and retired Marine R. Lee Ermey on the set of “Full Metal Jacket.”
Photo courtesy of the National Veterans Memorial and Museum.</figcaption></figure>

Just as Modine chronicled the making of Full Metal Jacket, he told the Sonnyboo Youtube Channel, he was working on a documentary around the exhibit.

For that film, Modine said he considered the name “Full Metal Roshomon,” a reference to its goal of presenting the multiple memories and viewpoints of other cast and crew, similar to the classic Japanese film. But in the end, he said, it will take the name of one of Ermey’s many well-known onscreen insults to offer a double-meaning with the movie itself: “Modern Art Masterpiece.”

“Full Metal Jacket Diary” is now on display at the National Veterans Memorial And Museum in Columbus, Ohio, and is scheduled to run through February.

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