At my immediate prompting, the conversation quickly turned and stayed the Full Metal Jacket. The movie, which has attained near cult-status among Marines, was my main interest and Lee was kind enough to tell me all I wanted to know.

He told me that the way it all started was that he was hired by Stanley Kubrick as a military consultant to keep the military aspect of the movie consistent and realistic. Kubrick was so impressed with him that he hired him for the part of the drill instructor and flew him to England where the first half of the movie was filmed.

Two days into the shoot, Lee was involved in a really bad automobile accident which broke an arm and a rib, along with other complications. Lee was worried that he would lose the part until, to Lee's surprise, Kubrick shut down production and invited Lee to stay at his house to heal.

While he was staying at the house, he told Kubrick that the lines for the drill instructor were all wrong. They had been written by a Hollywood screenwriter who had never spent a day in uniform so they were the stereotyped ravings of someone's uninformed imagination. Kubrick asked Lee to help him so they got a tape recorder and Kubrick would read the lines of the privates and Lee would react. Being a former drill instructor, Lee went into his DI mode and really let it fly. They continued doing this while Lee healed and by the time they were done, they had hundreds of pages of script which they took about 1 in 30 pages for the movie. So everything you hear come out of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman's mouth was a result of these sessions, straight from the mind of Ermey.