Full Metal Jacket is still as popular today as it was when it was released 30 years ago, possibly more. It's a movie that seemingly has everything, although one actor wishes that it still had one thing that was taken out. Mattew Modine, who played Joker in the film, says there was a scene that he shot for the film that never made it into the final version that he really wishes had been there. It contained the one thing that he felt Full Metal Jacket was actually missing, sex.
Matthew Modine tells Yahoo Movies that he made the offhand comment to director Stanley Kubrick that the one thing the film didn't have was sex, and when he returned from the movie's Christmas break, he found Kubrick had written a sex scene. According to Modine, the scene would have followed one where a Vietnamese prostitute tries to sell her services to Joker. He takes her up on the offer and the scene shows the two of them together in bed and sees Joker paraphrasing a line from the 1942 film Now, Voyager.
I lit two cigarettes just like Paul Henreid and said, 'We have the moon, let's not ask for the stars.' I reversed it because we had landed on the moon. It was all filmed in one flowing, elegant camera move. That's the one scene I wish was in the movie.
Unfortunately, there's no chance we'll ever see the scene as part of the special features on some future home video release. Stanley Kubrick routinely destroyed the negatives to the scenes he cut from his films, so nothing exists of the scene. It's also not clear why the scene was cut considering that Kubrick went to the trouble of writing and filming it even though it wasn't set to be in the movie in the first place.
This isn't even the only major deleted scene in Full Metal Jacket we've learned about recently. Our own Eric Eisenberg recently learned about another scene that was almost part of the film that puts R. Lee Ermey's drill instructor character in a whole new light.
In the end, Full Metal Jacket is still a phenomenal movie and nobody really felt a scene like this one was missing, which may ultimately be the reason Stanley Kubrick decided to cut it out. It simply didn't add anything necessary to the movie. Still, it's almost always a worthwhile effort to see deleted scenes from movies and it's unfortunate we'll never have that option in this case. Even if it's clear why a scene was deleted, you still get to learn something about the process of making the movie and get a glimpse into ways things could have been different.
