How Stanley Kubrick turned Norfolk into Vietnam: “The choices weren’t arbitrary”
Once Stanley Kubrick settled down in Hertfordshire, he decided that he was no longer interested in travelling great distances to shoot his next picture, as infrequent as they became in his later years.
For some directors, that could have posed a problem for making a Vietnam-era war story, which features scenes of battlefield combat that unfold on the other side of the world. Not one to be deterred, the auteur decided to bring Vietnam to him, or Norfolk, to be more accurate.
After settling down in England in the early 1960s, Kubrick became accustomed to his home comforts. Despite being set in New Hampshire, Lolita was filmed largely at Elstree Studios, Dr Strangelove was shot at Shepperton, as was 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange was captured on location around the London area, and it was back to Elstree for The Shining.
The furthest afield he went was relocating to Ireland for Barry Lyndon, dispatching his Space Odyssey second unit to Scotland, and sending his right-hand man, Jan Harland, to the United States to capture exteriors and additional footage for his Stephen King adaptation, but Full Metal Jacket was a different beast.
Not that you’d notice, with Kubrick spending almost a year in production without ever leaving the UK. Cambridgeshire, the Norfolk Broads, East London, Newham, and Bassingbourn Barracks, just outside of Hertfordshire, did the job he required. Even when it came to the Battle of Huế, a 32-day offensive that raged across South Vietnam, the filmmaker refused to budge.
When Matthew Modine’s Joker takes a helicopter ride along the Mekong Delta while a machine gunner arbitrarily fires outside to mow down anyone he sees in the fields below, visually, audiences didn’t question the veracity of what they were seeing, even though that scene was filmed in the air above the aforementioned Norfolk Broads.
As for the Battle of Huế, which dominates Full Metal Jacket‘s final act? Beckton Gas Works, a disused and derelict facility on the north bank of the River Thames. Audiences were so fully invested in watching the soldiers clear the titular city of Viet Cong forces that they never questioned that what they were seeing had all taken place in Newham.
While there were embellishments made to the surrounding area and structures to make it more convincing, it goes to show that simple things like geography and remotely accurate locations were of little concern to Kubrick, who’d rather recreate Vietnam within a 50-mile radius of his home than go anywhere near a real jungle or similar climate.
In explaining Full Metal Jacket‘s musical cues, particularly ‘Surfin’ Bird’, Kubrick matter-of-factly stated that “the choices weren’t arbitrary,” and having successfully transformed various parts of rural and industrial England into Vietnam to suit his needs, you could say the exact same thing about the shooting locations, too.
