Happy Birthday: Matthew Modine

Matthew Modine

Born: March 22, 1959 in Loma Linda, California, USA

Married to: Caridad Rivera (31 October 1980 – present) (2 children)

(On filming Full Metal Jacket) It was hard. Stanley Kubrick was, in every sense of the word, an artist. He knew everything there was to know about film production, about cameras, editing, music. He was just extraordinary, his depth of knowledge. He’d clearly read books about acting, but I think he didn’t trust emotions. One of the movies he always wanted to make was a film about Napoleon. Emotions were the downfall for Napoleon, in that he was such a strategic, amazing general in the way that his mind functioned, but the frailty of human beings is emotions, and what do actors work with but emotions? Drudging up memories of happiness and sadness. That was the complicated thing about working with Kubrick, was to be a technical actor and a well-oiled machine, and knowing all the aspects of what your character would be doing or what your lines are, but then there was emotion… human emotion. That was always a frustrating thing about working on a film, just the emotional aspect of the film…In every sense, I’m a better person emotionally, mentally. I’m just a better person having gone through that experience of working with Stanley Kubrick.

Val Kilmer might be responsible for how I got the part in Full Metal Jacket, because I didn’t know anything about it. You had to audition. You had to send a videotape to Stanley Kubrick to audition for the film. That was back when people didn’t have cameras and stuff like that. That was a brand-new technology. Clearly Val had auditioned for the film and sent his tape, and he was pissed-off at me and wanted to get into a fight with me, because not only had I done Vision Quest and Mrs. Soffel, which were two films he had maybe auditioned for, but now I was doing Kubrick’s film, and he was pissed off and wanted to get into a fight. I told him I wasn’t going to apologize, and if he wanted to take it outside, I was happy to do that, and I was in shape from Vision Quest. I would have kicked his ass. So I ran out of the restaurant that we were at in Los Angeles and called my manager and asked if he knew anything about my getting the role in Full Metal Jacket, and he didn’t know anything about it. Alan Parker was editing Birdy in London and Vision Quest was a Warner Bros. picture and Stanley Kubrick made his pictures with Warner Bros., so I said “Let’s call Warner Bros and get them to send Vision Quest, get Alan Parker to send some footage over to Kubrick in London,” and I got the part. So had Val Kilmer not sort of gotten pissed-off and challenged me in a restaurant and been angry at me for getting Full Metal Jacket, I would have never known about it.

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