Sean Musial, Staff Writer

Making movies is a long process that takes many months or even years to complete, oftentimes becoming straining on the actors and actresses involved with the project. War on the other hand is a drawn out conflict between two nations or states that spend years on gruesome battles, political unease and near genocide so that one combatant can out beat the other. Blending the two things together is a hard task. Recreating the environment that war brings is a difficult feat that affects not only those involved, but the viewers watching because of the monstrosities of the subject matter. In the words of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from “Full Metal Jacket,” which embodies what it means to become a soldier, “Let me see your war face!”

Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” is a 1987 Vietnam War movie that blends dark comedy with the atrocities of war, from its beginnings at bootcamp to the horrors of what it means to actually be a soldier. Mathew Modine played the film’s lead, Pvt. Joker, where he later published a book called “Full Metal Jacket Diary” that describes the grueling repetitive takes, the psychological toll and Kubrick’s demanding approach of creating the warfare that went on at the time. In the book, he explained that R. Lee Ermey’s boot camp training they endured was an emotional introduction to the start of filming where he later got the part of “Gunnery Sergeant Hartman” after originally being a technical advisor. Ermey’s legendary performance was largely unscripted and based on his time as a former Marine drill instructor, bringing an authenticity to the soldiers’ time while in the first part of the film. On top of Ermey’s intense performance, Vincent D’Onofrio transforms into “Pvt. Pyle” by gaining 70 pounds for the role and embracing the madness of what his character had gone through in the earliest stages of war. 

Considered one of the most grueling and disastrous movies to make of all time, “Apocalypse Now” turns Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” into a Vietnam War epic about a United States military captain that is sent to kill a rogue colonel that sees himself as a God-like figure. Francis Ford Coppala had this jarring task of creating the Vietnam War as accurately and as realistically as he could, putting his actors and crew through the ringer. The movie lead, Martin Sheen, suffered through a patch of mental illness as the director pushed him to the breaking point by making sure he was drunk in almost every scene which led to him to suffer from a nearly fatal heart attack during the opening scene. Other actors were intoxicated off of drugs while filming to help them embody what some of the soldiers went through while they were on them. The legendary actor Dennis Hopper had a daily drug and alcohol routine that could have killed him, while Sam Bottoms was taking huge amounts of LSD and marijuana to encapsulate his own performance.  

In “Saving Private Ryan,” the most prolific scene that the movie has to offer is the opening D-Day scene that has become arguably the most accurate depiction of the Normandy landings to date. Some soldiers that were there on June 6, 1944 would have sudden outbursts of PTSD because of how accurate the sequence truly was. Tom Hanks, who played Captain Miller, saw Omaha Beach as a “holy place” after the filming finished. Compared to his other actors on set, he was one of the few to make sure everyone had finished their bootcamp training for the film, which everyone looked back on very fondly.

The filming of the World War II tank movie, “Fury,” affected all of the actors involved. All of the main actors spent the first few weeks before filming getting to know each other in a training camp that was meant to make them feel miserable, leaving Logan Lerman out because he would be the newcomer to the crew. In the words of Jon Bernthal, he became inspired by the fact that a 50-year-old Brad Pitt got even happier as the filming got tougher. Shia Lebouf on the other hand lived up to the hype as a true method actor by getting his tooth pulled and slashing his face so he can have an open wound throughout the duration of filming. The actor even went as far as to not shower in the four months of the shooting process, reportedly being moved to another hotel away from the other actors due to the smell. 

When it comes to war in film, it becomes a straining and tedious process to recreate the devastating effects that come out of the conflict. Whether it’s World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War or even the Cold War, there are a plethora of movies out there that embody those individual wars in the best ways possible. The four movies that were referenced are just a glimpse into how these movies have affected the actors involved through preparation, their way of living and the mental toll it had on most of them.