John C. McGinley's Tales from the Set of Oliver Stone's "Platoon"

John C. McGinley auditioned for Platoon and got a tiny role. Then the movie collapsed and sat unmade for two years.

When Oliver Stone put it back together, the offer had changed. McGinley was now the fourth lead, playing Sgt. O'Neill, and the production was headed to the Philippines.

What happened there is the reason the film still lands the way it does.

It opened with a three-week boot camp in Manila, in a country in the middle of a revolution. Then Stone did something almost nobody does. He shot the film largely in sequence.

That single choice reorganized everything. The cast started at 24 men. As characters died in the script, those actors went home.

"By the end of it, there's three or four of us left," McGinley said. "And that diminishes how much the actors have to act, because everyone is gone. You don't have to act like they're gone. They're gone."

His theory of why it reads as truth on camera is blunt about what acting actually is.

"If you can reduce the profundity of a lie in front of the lens, it experiences that as good acting," McGinley said.

The surrounding conditions did the rest. Cory Aquino was president, and McGinley described a threatened coup roughly every Thursday, since the military was not in her back pocket. A group of American actors, he noted, would make convenient material in a coup.

That anxiety never left the set.

"When someone calls action and all of these things are roaming around in one's skull, the camera sees all that," he said. "And it cooks. It really pops in front of the lens."

McGinley gives the credit to Stone, who served two tours. "He tore that film out of his sternum."

None of which felt like a triumph at the time. The cast came home to find that the war movie audiences had embraced that year was Top Gun, and quietly concluded they had wasted about four months of their lives.

Then Stone slotted Platoon for a Christmas release, a decision McGinley still finds funny.

"Nothing says Christmas like Platoon," he said.

It came out. It did what it did.