Matthew Modine (R) in conversation with Filmmaker Magazine's Matthew Ross Tuesday night at the Apple Store (Photo: STV)

I hate to sound like a shill for IFP, but it does have a pretty bulletproof series of events going on around town this week. You heard about the <i>Nine Lives premiere, but actor Matthew Modine also dropped by the Apple Store in SoHo to discuss his new book, Full Metal Jacket Diary—an insanely comprehensive, um, diary of words and images about working with Stanley Kubrick for two years in the director's fabri-jungles outside London.

To thumb through the book is to wonder what the hell took so long for Modine to assemble such a magnificent resource. "Let's call it the Stanley Kubrick influence," he told The Reeler before meeting the standing-room-only crowd. "The photographs sat for a long time, and I always knew I wanted to do somehting with them."

But this book is huge. How and why did Modine get all of these snapshots?

"Maybe because I was playing a journalist, Stanley thought that it was appropriate for me to be taking pictures," he said. "I brought the camera because it was gift from a friend who said, 'Stanley would be really impressed if you knew how to use this old Roloflex.' And the first thing Stanley said when he saw it was, 'What are you using that old piece of junk for?' He talked me into buying 3,000 pounds' worth of Minolta camera equipment—which I had no aptitude for. The ergonomics of it just didn't fit.

"But there was something about that Roloflex—about looking down into that camera and (seeing) the stillness of Stanley's sets—the beauty of his sets, and the way he composes the shots with the time and care that I talk about in the book. That Roloflex really lends itself to that kind of photography. Everything I was looking at was sort of interesting and beautiful."

Modine went on to say that almost every photograph he took wound up in the book, which represents the latest contribution to the how-I-collaborated-with-Kubrick canon that peaked with Michael Herr's Kubrick and bottomed out with Frederic Raphael's Eyes Wide Open. And though Modine's exhaustive effort arrives more than six years after the director's death, it handily fills the spot yet unclaimed by any of Kubrick's actors.

"I can smell Stanley when I read Michael's book. I can feel him," Modine told me. "And somebody told me after they read (Diary) that it was a portrait of the artist as a young man. It was the Jedi going off to work with Yoda, Heart of Darkness—all of those things. It's a journey about becoming an artist. I would hear things that (Kubrick) would say that kind of echoed. When I told him I didn't know how to play this part, he said, 'I don't want you to play anything—I just want you to be yourself.' That's a frightening thing to say to a young actor."

But considering the ways in which Full Metal Jacket also launched the careers of other young actors like Vincent D'Onofrio and Arliss Howard (and framed non-pro actor Lee Ermey as the standard-bearer for all movie drill sergeants to come), the echo of Kubrick's resonant advice continues 20 years later. Also resonating—kind of—is the infamous late-night phone call to my idol Cindy Adams, chronicled on The Reeler a few weeks back. "Cindy Adams is a really sweet woman," he told me. "She's very kind and she's been very generous to me."

He paused. "Maybe she was tired? I don't know. She asked me to call her."

Whew! Finally, an answer! I can move on with my life at last.