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PINK FLOYD THE WALL
THE MAKING OF THE FILM, BRICK BY BRICK1
To be honest I should never have made Pink Floyd The Wall – it
was a bizarre accumulation of events that left me with the directorial
responsibilities. It‘s not that I‘m ashamed or displeased with the
result. On the contrary, I‘m very proud of it. But the making of the
film was too miserable an exercise for me to gain any pleasure from
looking back at the process. The American director Joe Losey once
said, ―Beware of a cozy British film set, because often, in the
creative process, ‗niceness‘ can lead to disaster.‖ The film of The
Wall was not cozy and niceness was in short supply, but curiously
we did some extremely good and original work.
1 Alan Parker, “Pink Floyd The Wall. The making of the film, brick by brick”, en
http://alanparker.com/film/pink-floyd-the-wall/making/ [22/abril/2013, 19:30 hrs.]
Half way through filming, the chief make-up artist Pete Frampton –
quite an accomplished caricaturist – pinned a drawing of Roger
Waters and Gerald Scarfe up onto the studio wall at Pinewood. It
depicted Roger and Gerry as two small, scowling, grubby public
schoolboys in school uniform, socks at their ankles, catapults
protruding from pockets and fingers disappearing up their bogeyed
noses. It was labeled ―Roger, the school bully and his nasty pal
Inky‖.
It was curious for us all to observe Gerry Scarfe look at the drawing,
tossing his head backwards as if snorting a nostril-full of snuff, and
seeing absolutely no humour whatsoever in the drawing. He had
spent his life being cruel to others in his own cartoon work and
probably never experienced anyone depicting him in this way. Or
maybe, brilliant caricaturist that Gerry is himself, he probably
thought the make-up man‘s draftsmanship rather inferior.
I first came to Pink Floyd‘s album The Wall as a fan. I‘d been a
Floyd devotee since *A Saucerful Of Secrets and over the years had
played *Dark Side Of The Moon so often it ended up scratched and
unplayable in its vinyl manifestation.
And as I listened to *The Wall album it was clear that it had dramatic
possibilities. The whole album had a narrative sense – although, in
those days, what exactly the sense was, I can‘t say that I, nor
anyone else, really understood. I had been in New York when the
concerts were performed at the Nassau Coliseum, and I remember
reading about it in the New York Times whilst filming Fame.
A casual telephone conversation with Bob Mercer, an executive with
EMI, led to me meeting with Roger Waters, who lived nearby in
Richmond. As we sat in his kitchen talking over the history of the
piece, it was obvious that he wasn‘t the typical zonked out rock star.
He demonstrated the evolution of the work with snippets of original
demo tapes. These were raw and angry – Roger‘s primal scream,
which to this day remains at the heart of the piece.
He suggested that I come back the next day and meet with Gerald
Scarfe, who had collaborated with him on the design of the live
show. Gerry is a famous cartoonist whose drawings I‘d long admired
in Private Eye and The Sunday Times. When he arrived he unrolled
a sort of storyboard, the size of a bed-sheet: a patchwork of his
spiky drawings, somewhat sepia with age.
I still had no intention of directing the film myself. And anyway, I was
more than preoccupied with my next film – Shoot The Moon with
Diane Keaton and Albert Finney. In three weeks I would be leaving
for San Francisco and was consequently reluctant to commit to any
other project. But Roger was very persuasive and I spent the next
two weeks returning each day, going through the script treatment
that Roger had written.
Eventually, I left for northern California to prepare Shoot the
Moon and Roger phoned me with an idea. Why didn‘t I produce the
film with him, with Michael Seresin (my long time cameraman whom
Roger had met separately) directing in tandem with Gerald Scarfe?
The idea appealed because I could be vicariously involved with a
project I had great hopes for, without having to sweat the blood that
directing requires. Some hope.
In January 1981 we began filming Shoot The Moon and,
simultaneously, I arranged for our British production manager, Garth
Thomas, to begin prepping The Wall with Production Designer Brian
Morris, whom I had worked with many times before.
In the middle of filming Shoot the Moon, Pink Floyd were performing
The Wall concert in Dortmund, Germany – supposedly for the last
time – and so Michael Seresin and I flew on the weekend of
Washington‘s Birthday – a public holiday in the US – from San
Francisco to Germany.
In Dortmund, it was impossible not to be impressed by the
immensity of the proceedings. The concert was rock theatre on a
mammoth scale – probably more grandiose and ambitious than that
genre had ever before achieved – a giant, raging Punch and Judy
show. The sound was awesome, the Floyd musically precise and
Roger‘s primal screams, the fears of madness, oppression and
alienation cutting through the cordite smoke like fingernails on a
blackboard. The sheer scale of the artistic undertaking was
extraordinary, not to mention the engineering problems that had
been overcome to present it.
Coming from the slow, almost archaic filmmaking process, to see
everything – every sound fader, every hoist, effect, brick, note and
light cue hit on time was impressive. The high point was the guitar
solo in Comfortably Numb, with Dave Gilmour perilously perched on
top of the wall, backlit, his weird shadow bleeding across the faces
of the 10,000 in the audience. Also, I had a chance to see Gerald
Scarfe‘s animation for the first time. The copulating flowers
metamorphosing from the erotic into the predatory took the
audience‘s breath away. The marching hammers of oppression
burst across the mammoth triptych screen with three projectors
synchronized with the live show sound. This created a theatrical
sensation that would be hard to emulate on the movie screen.
Anamorphic wide-screen Panavision and Dolby film sound suddenly
seemed feeble tools in comparison to this live rock‘n‘roll behemoth.
Backstage it was just as impressive – no cliché rock‘n‘roll partying
but an ultra-cool and professional atmosphere, not entirely relaxed,
a little edgy in fact, but they had a job to do and the job happened to
be music. Also what struck me was how everything was dominated
by Roger‘s autocratic, almost demonic control over the entire
proceedings.
Returning to Northern California I had my doubts that the project
would ever work. Roger and I had been masters of our own
particular universes for far too long for either of us to kowtow to the
other. It didn‘t feel quite right. Steve O‘Rourke, Pink Floyd‘s
manager, visited us in Sausalito offering unbounded enthusiasm and
was to be the Henry Kissinger shuttling between Roger and myself
in the year to come, trying to keep the peace.
Once the filming of Shoot the Moon was over, I returned to London
to complete the editing. It had gone very well and was a relatively
uncomplicated film, cutting together quite smoothly. This meant that
I could spend a little more time on The Wall, the next stage of which
was to work more seriously on Roger‘s script.
Roger, Gerald and I worked together at Gerry‘s house in Chelsea
and once more I would play straight man to Roger as I endeavored
to push it away from the theatrical spectacle and he would articulate
at great length the deeper meaning of each fleeting lyric. For Roger
it was never a case of writing a script, it was about delving into his
psyche to find personal truths, where I was more interested in the
cinematic fiction. Gerry would quietly and unemotionally monitor
these stormy ‗Special Brew‘ days between Roger and myself, and
when we left he would draw up the day‘s thoughts into a wonderful
cartoon patchwork that spread gradually across all the walls of his
studio. The difficult process was to abandon the established and
effective theatrical devices of the show for a more cinematic
approach. But throughout, the music of the album was the
touchstone for everything that we did, dictating the ebb and flow of
ideas.
As the script developed it retained many of the elements of the
show. One of the original intentions was to inject Pink Floyd as a
band throughout the piece – to act as narrators whenever our
imagery began to flag. To this end it was decided to put on five more
concerts in London where the band and some of the theatrics could
be filmed.
At this time, Steve O‘Rourke and I returned to Los Angeles to show
the new screenplay and Gerry‘s brilliant but lunatic storyboard to the
studios – confident that we could raise the money. It was a new
experience for me and a rather depressing one. The people who
had embraced me as a director, turned their backs on me as a
producer. As I would describe the unusual nature of the film to the
various moguls – that it was to be a fusion of different cinematic
techniques, live action and animation, that it was to be a fragmented
piece with no conventional dialogue to progress the narrative, music
being the main driving force – they would stare back at me with total
incredulity.
We had secured part of the budget from a German distributor who
was an ardent Pink Floyd fan. This surprised us because movies
involving World War II aren‘t popular in Germany. I suppose
because the good guys never win.
In Los Angeles, our problem was that no-one could comprehend that
we were proposing to make something other than a concert movie, a
genre that had traditionally yielded limp returns at the mainstream
movie box office. The enormous success of the album (11.7 million
had already been sold) was our trump card and they greedily eyed a
slice of the soundtrack album, of which Pink Floyd had no intention
of sharing a single cent.
Eventually MGM‘s David Begelman – with whom I‘d made Midnight
Express, Fame and Shoot The Moon – shook on a deal. He said,
―Alan, I don‘t understand this movie. No one in this company
understands this movie. Even my 19-year-old son doesn‘t
understand this movie and he‘s a big Pink Floyd fan. Are you sure
you can pull this off?‖ ―Quite sure,‖ was my answer. ―Don‘t worry, we
won‘t let you down, David. You know we‘re very responsible – we
always treat other people‘s money as if it‘s our own.‖
I bit my lip as I uttered the last dumb line. Begelman had famously
embezzled money from Columbia before landing the top MGM job
and was therefore familiar with treating other people‘s money as if it
was his own. He was also a compulsive gambler – regularly losing
$100,000 dollars at his weekly Hollywood card school. It‘s not
surprising that he was the only one in Hollywood mad enough to
take a punt on us.
Back in England, the concerts were put on at Earls Court in June
and over five nights we set about with multiple camera crews ready
to capture the necessary footage. The filming was a total disaster.
Michael and Gerry didn‘t gel as directors, or even realize what
exactly they should be doing. As for myself, I was quite useless as
an impotent director and even less useful as an impostor producer
and began chain smoking for the first time in my life.
From the start, the dilemma was that the needs of the film
compromised the show. The concert, better organized and ticking
along as it always did, could not be spoiled by the requirements of
the film crews, most of them befuddled and rudderless – completely
in the dark in more ways than one (the fast Panavision lenses
needed had no resolution and so the resultant rushes looked like
they had been shot through soup). As I sat alone in the backstage
area among the curious plastic chairs, picnic umbrellas and Astroturf
it was clear that we couldn‘t go on like this. Either we abandoned the
film, or I had to come out of the producer‘s closet and start directing
proper. Roger and the band had also come to the same conclusions.
There were a number of obstacles to me taking over. Firstly, Michael
Seresin, a good friend, who‘d worked as my cinematographer on
many of my films was obviously disappointed at being demoted and,
not unsurprisingly, he withdrew. Gerry Scarfe had his animation to
get on with and acquiesced more easily if not without some
resentment.
For myself it was a case of being back to square one. Roger was a
formidable challenge. His personality and grasp of the material were
intimidating for anyone who dared to creatively purloin it. But even
Roger wanted me to direct, wary as he was of my ‗final cut‘. We
were both obdurate to a fault. Or as my longtime producer Alan
Marshall eloquently put it: ―Two egotistical, opinionated fuck-pigs
who think they run the show when in actual fact it‘s everyone else
who does the work‖.
My main provisos were, firstly, that Roger should step back a bit to
give me air, and secondly for Alan Marshall to take the producer‘s
role that Roger and I were only half-accomplishing. Conveniently,
the six weeks of preparation prior to filming coincided with Roger‘s
summer holiday, so I got my space after all.
This was the most valuable time for me as I took the sparse
blueprint of our ‗script‘ and began to formulate the images that could
accompany the music. Meanwhile Gerry Scarfe had begun new
animations, including a maze and a human mincer for Another Brick
In The Wall Part 2, while Brian Morris set about translating these
drawings into mammoth sets.
The concert fiasco had provided us with an unexpected bonus in
that it proved the ‗band as narrator‘ idea was not only naff, but
superfluous. It was clear that the film was evolving as anything but a
concert film and so we had to avoid seeing the band.
My priority at this time was casting. Our main character, Pink, had to
be found and I trod the well-worn route of British and US film actors.
I also thought we should look at some other rock artists – not easily
sold to Roger as we had all agreed that he shouldn‘t play the part
himself, his skills being closer to those of Albert Speer than Albert
Finney.
Bob Geldof was suggested. I had liked his performance in a video
the Boomtown Rats had done for ―I Don‘t Like Mondays‖. We met
and I asked him if he‘d seen The Wall. ―Yes, I‘ve got one at the
bottom of my garden,‖ he answered. Bob wasn‘t a big Pink Floyd fan
but the notion of ―posing on cue‖, as he put it, rather appealed to
him. We did a screen test at Shepperton where he read Brad
Davis‘s courtroom speech from Midnight Express. He did it
wonderfully, surprising us all with his control. Being a non-swimmer
Bob‘s biggest fear was the swimming pool scenes and he spent two
weeks at Clapham Baths perfecting a passable dog paddle.
For the rest of the cast I relied very much on actors who had worked
with me before. I was particularly happy to get Bob Hoskins to play
the manager and for the hotel room scene I wrote dialogue for him
to work with, but he soon abandoned it and improvised on his own,
giving the crew rare laughs that were noticeably absent from the rest
of the filming.
We began filming on September 7, 1981 at a retired admiral‘s house
in East Molesey. The recently deceased occupant hadn‘t decorated
for many years allowing us to swiftly turn back the clock to the
1950s. From the start I had asked everyone to be brave, and for the
sequence of the teacher and his wife eating their gristle dinner the
cinematographer, Peter Biziou, lit the interiors with an enormous
‗brute‘ light at floor level. With the unusually harsh light, you could
see the pores on their faces. And so a pattern was set for the rest of
the filming.
Meanwhile, out in the garden, the second unit had the thankless
task of working with six cats and three crates of doves, in a vain
attempt to capture a single shot of a dove soaring into the sky. We
lost fifty doves and twenty pigeons before we grabbed the few
necessary frames of the fluttering of wings.
It wasn‘t a conventional screenplay, not shot by shot or storyboard
image by storyboard image; sometimes we had five lines of
description to go on and some days we had a great coloured
painting by Gerry to set us off on a chaotic, anarchic journey in
search of a film. The recurring dream of Pink‘s childhood – always
the journey never the destination, life as constant delirium as he
runs interminably across the rugby field, was filmed on Epson
Downs. I‘d seen a dozen different rugby pitches but none gave us
the eerie dream quality that we were after. Eventually I decided to
erect our own posts on a perfect spot on Epsom Downs, with the
early morning sun bleeding across the field as Pink runs towards us.
The World War II sequences had been streamlined to a practical
size by the time we dug in and transformed Burnham-On-Sea in
Somerset into the Anzio bridgehead, complete with barrage
balloons, bunkers and Italian gun emplacements. Our ―soldiers‖
were enlisted from the local Labour Exchange and performed like
regular troops in the battle scenes for In The Flesh? and the
aftermath that begins The Thin Ice. There were a few complaints in
the trench scenes when I introduced live rats amongst the piled up
soldiers, but a strike by the extras was averted when an additional
fee was negotiated with the promise that only non-biting, tame rats
would be used. For some reason, they fell for that one.
Meanwhile our model Stuka planes were put into the air – the first of
which unceremoniously nose-dived into the sand before we could
even turn on the cameras. The second plane had a similarly brief
lease on life, but gave us the shot we needed before it disintegrated
in mid air.
Geldof had his first taste of filming sitting in a chair in this alien
landscape. As he choked on our smoke machines and did more
shivering than acting, he suddenly realized that it was a long way
from the ‗posing on cue‘ that he had envisioned.
I don‘t think I tried anything on The Wall I hadn‘t tried before, but I
certainly tried *everything I‘d tried before. As a location for Pink‘s
drift into his memory and madness, we had built an enormous
composite set of his LA hotel penthouse suite at Pinewood and used
a special inclining prism on the lens of the Panaflex camera to allow
us to film from floor level to capture our distorted view of Pink. I
borrowed from Abel Gance and suspended the camera on a
pendulum to film Geldof thrashing around in the imagined pool of
blood as Pink recalls his father‘s death. Bob floated in the scarlet
syrup, the camera slowly zooming out to a position, suspended
upside down in the studio rafters. Destroying the hotel room took no
time at all. Bob launched himself, as usual, into each take with equal
ferocity, cutting his hands quite badly each time until there was little
left to break and we stopped to patch him up before he lost too
much blood.
The scenes of Pink‘s wife, played by Eleanor David, and her lover
were shot on location at a Kensington house. Sex scenes are
always difficult to pull off and your first job as a director is to relax
the actors, who in this case appeared to be more relaxed than I was.
James Hazeldine, who was playing the lover, arrived early, and I
sent him off to the pub across the street for a ‗stiffener‘. Only the
camera operator, focus puller, and myself were going to be there
while we shot the scenes and we moved the speakers close to the
bed, pumping up the volume of the playback tapes to maximum. As
the three of us encircled James and Eleanor — we were paid
voyeurs with a Panaflex camera – the 40 crew crowded in the room
next door must have wondered what the hell was happening as they
heard the residual grunts and groans when the music stopped.
Then we moved on to what we feared would be our most difficult
shoot: the Nuremberg-style rally we‘d conceived for In The Flesh.
Location-wise, we‘d settled for the reality of the Royal Horticultural
Halls in Westminster, with a specially built stage and a thousand
flags bearing Scarfe‘s crossed hammer symbol. Our problem was
the skinheads. How could we make them behave in a civilized and
safe manner? Stop them from being bored; stop them from kicking
everybody‘s heads in?
The toughest section of the skinhead crowd was a group called the
Tilbury Skins from South East London. We had partially diffused the
threat of real violence by elevating this group to a more prestigious
position in the film as Pink‘s ‗Hammer Guard‘ and we were going to
use this bunch of mostly amiable loonies as the nucleus of the
violence that was to follow. Our stunt co-ordinator had been working
with the skins for a month previously at Pinewood, showing them the
rudiments of film stunting and the way to kick someone in the face
without breaking their nose and jaw.
Slowly we superimposed a sort of disciplined logic onto their violent
behaviour – well sort of. I remember the crowd reactions as Geldof
first made his entry for In The Flesh and then proceeded to sing the
odious lyrics. The sheer spectacle of the proceedings was very
seductive and I can remember my fears that some in the audience
were taking the diseased and demented Pink rather too seriously.
When you‘re making a film, it‘s pieced together like a giant Lego set,
shot by shot, decision by decision — a thousand decisions a day –
and then you eventually see the cumulative effect this has on an
audience. Only then do you realize the power you wield. The most
alarming feeling was in a pub at lunchtime, when our jackbooted
guards in full uniform walked in and ordered their pints. The local
residents, unaware that it was a film, drank up and promptly shuffled
off, believing these shaven-headed, Nazi-uniformed gentlemen were
for real.
So violence the skins could do, but how would they feel about
*dancing? For Run Like Hell our choreographer, Gillian Gregory,
who had worked with me on Bugsy Malone, had devised a Nazi-like
disco routine. She had spent the morning rehearsing the crowd in
batches of a hundred in the car park opposite, and had whipped
them into passable shape. I remember my conflicting feelings as the
assembled skinheads dutifully performed their fascist frug to the
play-back tapes – acting as one in an unthinking, programmed,
mechanical mass. On stage, Bob goaded them into action with his
crossed arms hammer salute and they followed with a zombie-like
precision, no doubt perfected on the terraces of Millwall Football
Club.
So far, so arduous. We‘d tangled with rats and cats, destroyed
Stukas, wrangled skinheads, and borrowed a special camera lens
off a group of research biologists in Oxford (for the shot at the
beginning that moves from Pink‘s Mickey Mouse watch to the centre
of his eye) but I‘d stayed on the right side of Roger and failed to kill
Bob. Or that was the case until we shot the ―asylum‖ scene.
In a very early script Roger had alluded to a bald-headed loony
munching sweets in a padded cell. This fear of impending madness
– probably Roger‘s fear of becoming Syd Barrett – were images that
I wanted to develop and which Roger had wished he‘d never
mentioned. Especially the bald-headed loony.
At a disused cake factory in Hammersmith, we had converted a
dilapidated, damp-walled warehouse into a surreal mental ward. Up
to now I had near asphyxiated Bob with toxic smoke, shaved off his
eyebrows with an open razorblade, nearly drowned him in a
swimming pool full of blood, cut his hands to shreds destroying the
hotel room — all without complaint. However, the application of the
viscous pink make-up was dreadfully uncomfortable for Bob and so,
for the first time on the film, he rebelled. As he was dragged down
the iron fire escape in the bitterly cold air, clothed in the remnants of
his underpants and a bucket of pink gunk, he was heard to shout,
―Parker‘s gone too fucking far! I will not be physically abused!‖
Back at Pinewood, Brian Morris had finished our biggest set; the
school maze and human mincer complex for ―Brick 2‖. We had
drilled the kids into regimented automatons, the pink masks wiping
out their personalities as they are processed through the production
line of a blinkered educational system.
I always thought it ironic that the mesmeric chorus in Another Brick
In The Wall Part 2 was recorded by pupils at Islington Green
Secondary School, whose subsequent claim to fame was as the
school Tony Blair refused to send his children to. The school has
one of the highest truancy rates in Britain, which is probably why so
many of them turned up for the original recording.
The destruction that accompanies the guitar solo began in the
studio, where the sets were demolished for real by our eager young
actors, and continued at Beckton Gasworks where a derelict
Victorian building was carefully set on fire by the Special FX
department – eyed nervously by the local Fire Brigade. The result is
one of the more disturbing moments in the film: Pink‘s murky surreal
daydream, as he is bullied by the Teacher for writing poetry.
―Absolute rubbish, laddie,‖ scolds Teach as he reads aloud the
childish rhyme – actually the lyrics of *Dark Side‘s Money, a lame
joke of mine at Roger‘s expense and consequently of little
amusement to him.
We were now into the final week of filming but no nearer a
conventional ―conclusion‖. Months before, we‘d written in the script a
phrase which read, ―We cut to the Broader Issues‖. It was a
reminder to underline our overarching theme: the walls and barriers
that are erected in society resulting in our alienation from one
another. It was nebulous, but it was all we had.
Consequently, on day 57, the call sheet read, ―Exterior. Night.
Broader Issues: 150 rioters and police; stunts; police riot equipment;
police vans, cars, motorcycles; FX fire, smoke and explosions; tear
gas guns.‖ Quite what I was going to do with this assemblage, I
wouldn‘t know until the night.
We were in Beckton again, where the decaying skeleton of the
gasworks complex had become our inner-city film studio. Many
years later Stanley Kubrick shot much of Full Metal Jacket there, but
in 1981 the industrial waste was still in evidence and the crew were
demanding ‗dirty money‘ for working in the rain, ankle deep in years
of coal dust and silicosis. On top of those problems, the only riot
image I‘d pre-conceived was the ‗wall‘ of police, their shields glinting
in the flames. As the night drew on and the skinheads and ‗police‘
clashed for the dozenth time, tempers rose. However many times
we reminded them that this was a make-believe riot, the fighting
always seemed to continue long after I had yelled ‗cut‘.
Ultimately, the violent scenes in Run Like Hell were probably the
ugliest we shot. The café set we‘d built behind Kings Cross railway
station was completely destroyed by the Tilbury Skins, who couldn‘t
believe their luck. The rape scene was the most repugnant of all,
and any amount of professionalism on behalf of the crew can never
detract from the vicarious involvement you have as filmmakers.
The main shoot was completed after 61 consecutive fourteen-hour
days consisting of 977 shots, 4,885 takes and 350,000 feet of film.
After 16 weeks of us running free Roger returned to reclaim his baby
and I received a stark reminder of the realities of the collaborative
process.
Roger and I collided one day in the dubbing theatre both vomiting
venom, like the Judge in the animation sequence. Curiously our arm
wrestling was rarely about creative matters. Our problems were
more about creative authorship than creative differences.
Fortunately, my editor Gerry Hambling had little patience for puerile
squabbling. He continued to astound us all as he fashioned, with
scalpel and meat cleaver, my live action, and nipped and tucked at
the animation to make it work with the music.
Our editing staff grew ever bigger as tracks were laid and opticals
prepared in our attempt to meet our proposed Cannes Festival
deadline. Meanwhile at Pinewood Theatre 2 Dubbing Theatre,
James Guthrie, the engineer of the original album, was pre-mixing
the music tracks. He was keen not to miss too many generations of
sound and would be mixing onto film directly from the original
recorded masters. To this end a truckload of additional equipment
arrived (including three linked-up 24-track desks), until the place
resembled a Boeing 747 ripped apart for an overhaul.
There was also music to produce. The Tigers Broke Free had yet to
be recorded and Roger set about the task with Michael Kamen, who
had written orchestral arrangements on the original album. There
were new versions of Mother and In The Flesh, Outside The Wall
was completely reworked with a brass band (technically a ‗silver
band‘) while Bring The Boys Back Home gained a full orchestra and
the Pontardulais Welsh Male Voice Choir.
The animation studio now moved down to Pinewood and an artists‘
sweat-shop was set up in the old gatehouse overseen by Gerry
Scarfe and the principal animator, Mike Stuart. They had been
working for well over a year on the seven minutes of new animation
and perfecting the cells from the existing concert footage, adding up
to 15 minutes of animation in the finished film. It was a bewildering
time for Gerry amidst the cut and thrust of movies, distant as he was
from the cozy environment of his Chelsea studio and the solitary
artist‘s life, but he continued to turn up.
The dub is always the most rewarding part of the film, when all the
elements come together for the first time. It‘s also, on a normal film,
the most comfortable time, away from the insane ‗controlled chaos‘
of a film set. Much to everyone‘s surprise, it was a smooth and civil
process and the most amiably co-operative time between Roger and
myself. He was very keen to join Guthrie and the other mixers on the
sound desk, allowing him the tactile pleasure of once again being
back in touch with his original creation.
After eight months of editing we had arrived at our final cut. We‘d
shot 60 hours of film which was whittled down to 99 minutes of
screen time and Gerry Hambling had made 5,400 cuts. The
animation artists had done over 10,000 full colour paintings to
complete their 15 minutes of screen time. When we began, in my
customary letter to the crew, I had likened the upcoming film to
Livingstone going up the Zambezi. Now that it was finished, it felt
more like going over Victoria Falls in a barrel.
AFTERWARDS
On reflection, Pink Floyd The Wall was quite the most miserable
time I ever had making a film. It‘s a scream of pain from beginning to
end. But sometimes out of conflict comes interesting work. I never
had the advantage of going to film school, so this is probably my
student film – the most expensive student film in history. In a way,
it‘s an experiment in cinematic language. The parameters were
never set and, budget constraints apart, no limits imposed — all of
which was creatively liberating. It was like the image of Geldof lying
amongst the debris of his trashed room: the pieces put back
together to create a weird and wonderful work of art.
Because of the continued success of the album, the film also
endures, having become a cult hit of the genre. But when it came
out it wasn‘t even reviewed by film critics, probably under the
misapprehension that it was a rock‘n‘roll concert film. The band‘s
insistence that Pink Floyd‘s name stay in the title didn‘t help. At the
time, most film critics were of a certain age and had little relationship
with rock music.
For all the misery that the film conjures up for me I am still very
proud of it. It predated the popularity of the music promo and was a
brave, original, if somewhat lunatic, endeavour. Anyway, I wish I had
a dollar for every shot I‘ve seen copied on MTV.
When it was finished, it was duly shown at the Cannes Festival
where we were one of the last films to be screened in the old Palais.
To make sure it sounded as it should – uncompromised by the then
feeble, film festival sound – two truckloads of Pink Floyd PA were
driven to the South of France, and when the music hit full throttle the
whole building began to shake — large flakes of paint drifted down
from the Palais ceiling, covering the audience with giant dandruff. It
was a magnificent experience, much appreciated by the audience.
Stephen Spielberg stood up at the end and politely bowed towards
me. He then shrugged to his neighbour, Warner Brothers studio
head Terry Semel, apparently saying, ―What the fuck was that?‖
After the openings of the film, I never ever saw Roger Waters again.
The album cover of the next Floyd album portrayed a tall gentleman
in World War II British army officer‘s uniform holding a film can and
with a large knife in his back. The album was called *The Final Cut.
Waters left the group soon after. I remain friends with Pink Floyd‘s
Dave Gilmour and Nick Mason, but whenever I‘ve had occasion to
bump into Gerald Scarfe (he lives near me in London) he shudders
and avoids me. He‘s an odd one is Roger‘s pal Inky.
Steve O‘Rourke, Pink Floyd‘s longtime manager and the glue that
held this film together, was chatting up my assistant Angie one day
in our bungalow in the Pinewood gardens when he received an
important phone call back at his office in the main block. He charged
back and, being dreadfully myopic, he ploughed through the closed
plate-glass doors, shattering them and filling his face with arrows of
glass. Angie bent over him and lovingly plucked the bloody shards
from his face, leading to the only nice thing that came out of the
movie of Pink Floyd The Wall: they fell in love and got married.
Sadly Steve died in November, 2003 and his coffin was sent off to
the sound of the band playing The Great Gig In The Sky.
David Begelman, the boss of MGM, was the only person in
Hollywood we could persuade to make this film. When I showed him
the completed film he confessed that he found it disturbing and
particularly asked me to take out a shot of maggots consuming a
lamb‘s brain. On August 8, 1995, plagued by his own personal
demons, he checked into the Century Plaza Hotel and in corner king
room 1081, took out a .38 pistol and blew his brains out.
*The Wall album went on to sell 23 million (plus) copies, becoming
the third biggest-selling album in history.
Originally published as production notes and this version by Mojo
Magazine, Jan 2010
AFTER, AFTERWARDS
The success of the album continues as new generations discover it.
Roger still performs and tours his own personal version of the stage
show, updated as it is with digital brilliance and session musicians.
Roger even invited me to see the show at the O2 arena, and was
most welcoming. Gerald Scarfe also made his peace with me. When
he was preparing his own book on his personal journey with ‗Pink
Floyd on The Wall‘.
I was not overly surprised to read that he had an equally torrid time
on the movie as myself. He wrote, on dealing with me, ―One morning
I drove to Pinewood studios with a bottle of Jack Daniels on the
seat. I knew what was coming and had to have a slug before I went
in.‖
Didn‘t we all.
All text © Alan Parker. All photos © Tin Blue Ltd. Stills photography:
David Appleby. Cinematographer: Peter Biziou