Today, on what would have been Stanley Kubrick’s birthday, our scene comes from 1987’s Full Metal Jacket.  

By most account, Kubrick was a director who did not regularly encourage improvisation but he apparently made an exception while filming Full Metal Jacket, allowing R. Lee Ermey to come up with his own dialogue for the majority of his scenes as Sgt. Hartman.  At one point, Kubrick apparently even asked Ermey to clarify what some of his more colorful lines were referring to.

In this scene, Hartman meets his latest batch of recruits and lets them know that they are the lowest of the low.  One thing that is often missed about this scene is that Ermey specifically played Hartman as being a drill instructor who was bad at his job, as someone who broke down his recruits but failed to build them back up.  (Being a former drill instructor, Ermey knew what he was talking about.)  It’s a bit ironic that, to many, Ermey’s Hartman is the first character they think of when they think of a drill instructor.