"PINK FLOYD: THE WALL"

Special limited letterbox widescreen laserdisk version with second audio
track of director Alan Parker's commentary on the film. This is a
transcript of Parker's commentary, transcribed by Dave Ward
<pink-floyd@writeme.com>.


[Opening scene of hallway fades in]

Hi, I'm Alan Parker and I'm going to be talking to you about "The Wall."
Well, this opening section... This is a set we built actually at Pinewood
[Studios outside London]. The significant thing about this is how low it
is. The whole thing was shot through a prism in order to get the camera
angle as low as you see; practically on floor level. You hear Vera Lynn at
this point, which obviously we put on afterwards, although we did play it
whilst we did the track. Almost every single shot in the film was done to
music. Almost nothing was done without playing music as loud as we could
possibly hear it because that was everybody's inspiration. For this shot,
Vera Lynn was the inspiration.

I've been involved with music films before, like "Bugsy Malone," so when I
first came to Pink Floyd, if I was *ever* involved in making the film, it
was really to advise them in not getting involved with the wrong people and
to make sure that that original vision was clear. I bought the album just
as a fan of Pink Floyd, and I thought that it was cinematic, so I met with
Roger and Roger went through his demo tapes and tried to explain what
it--the vision that he had when he actually did the album, and *Roger*
always thought of it as cinematic, so me saying it should be a film was not
actually original news for him. 'Cause he always wanted it to be a film.

I was really there to encourage him to make it as a film, not for *me* to
make it as a film. That's the most important thing. And to advise Roger in
not getting involved with the wrong people in film, a world that he didn't
know. It was suggest that Roger always wanted to be completely involved in
the making of the film. Gerald Scarfe who had done a great deal of the
animation in the original concerts would be involved, and was obviously
very important in the visualization of what Roger had in mind. And then
they had to put it on film, so it was suggested that my cinematographer,
Michael Seresin, would be involved. I was trying to encourage that to
happen. And it was suggested that Roger and I would produce it, and that
Gerald Scarfe and Michael Seresin would actually direct it. That was the
beginnings of everything really, in my early conversations with Roger.

Now we're into "The Tigers Broke Free" which is a piece that Roger did
specially for the film. But it's pretty important to him, this particular
scene 'cos obviously this is relevant to his own father... All this was
done on sets at Pinewood. Very beautifully lit by [director of photography]
Peter Biziou.

[On screen we see Pink's father.] This is James Laurenson, a very good
English actor actually; not famous but extraordinarily subtle. In trying to
explain to him what it is you want, there are no words, there is no script
at this point--just the barest essentials really written down to explain
what's happening. In a way, I suppose, he represents Roger's father, but
all of this was a very simple one-sentence piece that was evolved into this
scene, the placing of the bullets and everything.

[The screen fades into the rugby field.] Merging one image with another is
something that we did all the way through the film. This is an image that
appears many times. I don't know why it's a rugby field, really, in so much
as, I suppose Roger comes from that kind of middle-class background. That
image which we did on Epsom Downs [southwest of London] is something that
reoccurs and then resolves later.

[We see the close-up of Pink's Mickey Mouse watch.] Now this whole scene,
which is to really zero in on the minutiae of the person that we ultimately
will be telling the story through, all of this was done totally out of the
main film-making really. This was done at Oxford Scientific Laboratory,
'cos you could never achieve this shot outside of that kind of a technical
background. These were the days before [George Lucas' special effects
production house] Industrial Light and Magic.

The most important thing here is how I held back the sound desperately.
It's really quite quiet... As you go in on to the door. In order to hit, in
those days, state-of-the-art stereophonic sound, it was meant to be
quiet... [The maid knocks on the door to Pink's room.] You hear just the
sound effects. The keys, which is all, it's exaggerated sound effects, as
Pink is thinking about the audience that is desperate to get into his
concert... And then the sound begins. [The door creaks.]

[WHAM! The first notes of "In the Flesh" play and the crowd bursts in.]
We've blown a few speakers over the years as they hit that first sound. All
this is shot in many different places. This is Wembley Stadium we're
looking at; all these young Americans running in to a concert. At this
point we're entirely inside his mind; this is what he's imagining. This is
actually what's happening outside at the concert he's about to go to. This
is conventional, all those things, as Pink grows in his contempt for his
audience and the world that he's living in, and not being able to deal with
it. This is meant to be a classic American rock 'n' roll concert that Pink
might well experience as a rock 'n' roll star. To show the nastiness going
on outside--none of which of course is ever experienced by the rock 'n'
roll star who's closeted inside in the dressing room--they show the
violence that can occur in an audience supposedly going to enjoy
themselves. Wasn't unusual in those days. And now the comparison with the
violence [of war]... And now into a presage if Pink's nightmare.

[Pink sings: "So ya thought ya might like to--"]

What happened in those early days was Roger explained to me what he
*really* had in mind, and it did exist already as a theatrical performance,
a very, very sophisticated and elaborate theatrical show. And it was really
Roger filling in all of the details of what he had in mind when he was
writing it. I met with Gerry Scarfe and Roger *very,* very early on, and
Gerry rolled out this fantastic sort of, incredibly beautifully painted key
images, really, more than a story board. I said to them both, I said,
"Well, you don't *need* anybody. Why don't you two go ahead and do it?" It
was their work, with me still as producer. I worked on it at Gerald
Scarfe's house with Roger. The three of us met for many, many meetings. We
gradually fleshed out a treatment, but it was trying to get out of Roger
what he had in mind. Gerald would sit there very quietly and then he would
do these extraordinary images that sort of summed up the day's work really.
A conventional screenplay never existed; until the day we finished the film
it never exited. But what we did have was Roger writing what was in fact a
treatment allied to extraordinarily powerful, wonderful paintings that gave
life to everything that we talked about in doing five or six hour meetings.

[The airplane dives down to kill Pink's father.] The concert was still the
most powerful thing that we all had in our mind from a visual point of
view. To that end, with Gerry Scarfe directing and Michael Seresin
directing and me and Roger being the producers, we set up five concerts in
London of the actual "Wall" concert. And it was, in theatrical terms and in
audience terms it was complete success. In cinematic terms in was complete
and utter disaster, quite frankly. We threw it all away, and like a week
later everybody came to me and said, "We have to rethink." I really cared
and really thought that it could be a great movie done from Roger's work. I
was too far in to just walk away and say, "Okay, that's another thing that
didn't happen, another rock 'n' roll disaster." I don't know if I ever
wanted to put my head on the block and have it chopped off to try and do it
myself, but in the end I was too far in, and so I agreed to direct it.

[We see a closeup of a pool of blood, drawing back to show a dead soldier's
hand, then the war-torn landscape.] This is an interesting shot in that it
starts small, in a pool of blood and oil, and goes past the debris, up to
what is in fact a pretty wide warscape, all achieved in Barnstaple in the
south of England [in Devon, on the Bristol Channel]. It appears to be much
bigger than it is, there's no--in the days before digital enhancement,
everything you see is what we filmed. [The first piano notes of "The Thin
Ice" play.] To show the horror of war going into what is in fact a very
delicate song sung by Gilmour. Again, all this is the Anzio beachhead, a
real folly with regards to the British Army and the Second World War,
relevant to Roger losing his father. Shows the, just the sheer horror of
war. [We see wounded and dead troops as Gilmour sings, "And daddy loves you
too."] These images were taken from Vietnam photographs, funnily enough.

[Images of silhouetted soldiers in a line walking wearily into the
distance.] And this happened, this shot. It actually was never storyboarded
or written. It was just something that we did on the spur of the moment, a
very powerful and graphic shot. Probably the best shot in the whole
sequence.

Now we're back in the hotel room in Los Angeles where Pink is just sitting
there, just the debris of  a rock 'n' roll star's untidy room. This is an
interesting tracking shot, takes you through outside, all of which is
inside the studio at Pinewood. The whole swimming pool and everything was
built, the whole Los Angeles backdrop is obviously recreated. And then we
find Bob [Geldof], who isn't a very good swimmer. He was very bravely lying
there.

And this whole next sequence [of Pink thrashing in the bloody pool] really
is, it's really relevant to Gerry Hambling's brilliant editing. This I did
on a camera suspended from a pendulum. And then as we threw in more and
more blood, we suddenly had this horrific image of a man drowning in his
own blood, all of which was a mistake really because as we put more blood
in just to make his hand bleed for another sequence, suddenly had a man
drowning in his own blood and you ended up with this extraordinary graphic
image. Just like taking advantage of things that happen that you didn't
really count on when you shot it, you end up with this hugely graphic shot.

["Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2" begins.] Now we're back to young Pink,
having lost his father. Classic suburban English church. Little boy with
his airplane, his mother praying. Back to Roger, I guess, when he was a
kid. All the pain started here. In the end Jerry's drawings were what Roger
had in mind, and then it takes a different form when it's real. Beautifully
lit sequence by Peter Biziou actually.

Anybody who cares to look at that plaque, it's kind of more relevant than
it ought to be. [The plaque on screen reads: "1939 - 1945 In honour of the
officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the 8th-9th battalion, the
Royal Fusiliers,who gave their lives in the Second World War at Anzio, A.D.
1944."]

There, in just an English playground. These don't exist anymore. It's
probably the last one, we filmed in. This little boy actually wants to be
part of the other kids, but with no father feels a bit out of it... [Pink
tugs the sleeve of another boy's father's and asks him, "Please put me on
there."] This is an actor, Ray Mort, who'd worked with me in a couple of
other films I'd done. He bravely came in, not quite knowing what he was
doing except this kid was grabbing at his arm, and he obligingly puts him
onto the roundabout. But the kid wants more: he wants his father.

We got a whole lot of scenes actually, hand-held, coming down that slide
which we didn't use.

That's a nice shot, actually. Just a kid being rejected. That is a better
shot, the one before, because it's wider and it's just kind of more subtle.
That's more deliberate. Then the kid goes on to the swing and just [intake
of breath] I don't know... becomes Roger Waters, I suppose. Just sits
there, and thinks: "How can I be angry at the world?"

Anyway, the other kids had moms and dads, and he didn't. That's really what
we were trying to say. I don't know about his haircut.

[Young Pink walks into his home, whistling.]

There we go to the slightly older Pink. This actually was the first day of
filming, this shot. [7 September 1981.] Which was pretty horrendous. I was
very nervous. Roger came for the first day of filming. This was shot in the
suburbs of London, just close enough for the crew to get there. It's a real
house. It was a retired admiral who'd just died. Those are the best houses
to get, where people have just died, 'cos the houses just stay the same.
Nothing had changed; very few props were needed... Just to show the young
Pink going up the stairs, just classic British suburban house. Stopping at
the bedroom door of his mother, maybe looking 'cos she's not around. ___
classic bedroom that we all grew up with as kids. Looks at different
things. Mother's not around, so, maybe he can explore, probably as we all
did. And he goes through the chest , and discovers things that maybe he
hadn't seen before, different bits and pieces, like his mum's bra--not
interested in that. Then he finds remnants of his dead father. It's a
complete reprise. The whole thing is meant to be a reiteration of what
happened to his father. If you look at the scroll, if anybody stops the
frame there, we see it's about Pink.

Takes a box of bullets, which we go in on--same bullets that we saw earlier
on, when "The Tigers Broke Free" was at the beginning of the movie...

[We see reflections of young Pink in a three-paneled mirror.] Triptych
again: something which was relevant to the original rock 'n' roll show
where they did have images in triptych.

["Goodbye Blue Sky" begins. No comment until Gilmour sings, "Brave new
world unfurled beneath the--"]

Now into Gerald Scarfe's imagery of the horror of war. Unbelievably
powerful imagery. Gerry was a hysterical cartoonist, really. But more than
a cartoonist. I mean, he's an extraordinary artist. Very *vicious*
cartoons, he's very well known for. But he's an extraordinary artist, and
much of this--as most of our generation, Gerry and Roger and I are roughly
the same age, the Second World War and living through it as young kids born
it it, I was, as was Roger and Gerry--it's a very significant part of your
background. And the imageries that followed afterwards--for most of what
you see in this film, in fact--those are Gerry's versions of it, the blood
of war and the stupidity of war.

[The three boys are headed towards the train. "Them are bullets, airn't
they?" "I don't know." "Come on, Tubbs. Scairt of goin' in the tunnel?"]

This sequence is of young Pink. This was done in Yorkshire, the only place
where you still have a steam train. That's the reason it was done there.
You see a very interesting shot any moment now. Young Pink is going down
the bank, and then the last kid falls: that was a mistake. That was a
complete mistake. Keep the camera running. Poor kid. I think he had grazed
knees, but he looks really good in it. What is in fact __?__ imagery,
conceived beforehand, but it's slightly different in how you see it.

[Pink sets the bullet on the tracks, and the train hits it.] This is the
Second World War, and there are other images obviously that--I don't think
we should go too deep into what we're trying to say.  Faceless people being
carried away, which is part of the Second World War which we never knew in
England, of course, at the time. [The teacher shouts: "You!"] And then
straight back to--very simple cutting with regards to the mask and the boy
and the teacher. This whole scene actually became this, which is very
simple and very graphic. Originally it had a *huge* inflatable of the
teacher flying down on a great crane, which was a vestige of the stage show
which we threw away.

[The school bell rings in the teachers' room.] Now we're into Pink in his
young school days. All of these teachers are caricatures of Rogers and mine
and Gerry's past. And the teacher is castigating the young boy...

[The teacher asks, "What have we here, laddie?"] I actually wrote this
little scene using the lyrics of "Money", which is one of Roger's big hits.
I thought it was significant to use the lyrics of a rock 'n' roll song that
sold zillions. [The teacher reads: "Money, get back/ I'm all right, Jack/
keep your hands--"] In the mouths of the teacher, he would never *possibly*
have realize that the young kid could actually write poetry, let alone be a
lyricist. I think we all experience that. [Teacher: "Get on wiyyur work!
Repeat after me--"]

Alex McAvoy played the teacher. Somebody I hadn't worked with before but he
was like--he had exactly the same accent that was used in the original,
which was actually Roger doing a Scottish accent. This guy has a real
accent. The teacher's wife--Marjorie Mason actually--is somebody who'd
worked with me before in a couple of other films I'd done. And she was the
teacher's wife, who gave him *hell* at home, and therefore he took it out
on the kids when he was at school.

Really beautifully shot by Biziou. Really unusual in that this is *very,*
very harsh light. Very brave actually, in that boots were put on the floor
without the Fresnels [a lens used with spotlights] in them.

[The Floyd sing: "We don't need no education--"] Now we're into "Another
Brick In The Wall," probably the most significant part of the movie. The
most important imagery, in a way, in that Roger, Gerry, me, whoever--we
grew up in this kind of English school system where they just churn you out
and you become a faceless individual, which I suppose we all tried--and
indeed we've all fought against. But it puts you on this conveyor belt and
they churn you out. All of this imagery I think is, I think it's more Fritz
Lang [filmmaker who made "Metropolis" in 1927] than it is anything else.
The drawing of the maze and the machines was done by Gerry Scarfe, and
Brian Morris, production designer, built this fantastic set. As we watch
these kids, automatons really--somebody out-of-step--faceless, no identity,
just a response to the kind of education we all had.

[We see rows and rows of school children sing: "We don't need no
education."] This is poor man's Industrial Light and Magic. Actually,
there's only the kids in the front. The rest is all an optical. [The
teacher shouts, "How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?"]
All relevant to ad libbed things, the teacher's ad libs, which is actually
Roger on the original album. Trying to put them into a narrative form. And
the machinery and this __?__ macabre, nightmarish world that we all found
ourself in as kids going through the British educational system, just
plunking it into a machine that just churns you out like a sausage machine.
[We see the ground beef coming out of the machine.] Comes from an original
drawing that we made into a real set. And out at the end came that. That's
us.

[The children start demolishing the school.] Had to have violence. This is
the fact that you don't have to put up with that. We were criticized a lot
for this violence actually when the film first came out. It's very easy to
direct this. You just tell the kids to break the place up, and boy did they
do it. You can't rehearse this kind of thing, you know? I had a
choreographer, Gillian Gregory, with me the whole time. On the kind of
schedule this was shot, this film didn't have a lot of rehearsal. But yeah,
they knew what they were doing before they got there. And then there are
times like this, just the burning of the school, you just set the kids
loose really and film it, and worry that no one gets hurt. It's very
powerful imagery. The teacher, we actually put on the fire but I that was
actually cut out of the final film. It was thought to be too violent. But
that will be the culmination of that scene, cut very judiciously, of
course...

[Roger sings: "Mother do you think they'll drop the bomb?"] We redid the
"Mother" song, partly it had to do with length, and being relevant to the
imagery we had, and also I think Roger wanted to redo it again. It's a very
delicate piece. All of these are images which will be played off later;
it's just a presage of what's to come.

We never ever thought about jumping in time. I mean, in the end you hope
that there's enough sort of forward motion of the narrative line to
actually take you through, but I think audiences are much more tolerant
than people believe. The classic American narrative line is that you don't
jump back and forth. It's much more European, I suppose. It never ever
occurred to us that it actually would be a problem for people. As long as
the forward strength of the narrative is always there.

[Gilmour sings, "Momma's gonna make all of your nightmares come true."]
When I started to think about who could play Pink, it was suggested very
briefly that Roger might play it himself. And I saw everybody--rock 'n'
roll stars, actors--I read everybody in London, and I read with everybody
in New York, from an acting point of view. And we kind of quirkily went
with Bob Geldof. I'd seen him in a video that he'd done in very early
Boomtown Rats, and I thought it was very special. He did a screen test for
me where we reenacted a scene from "The Wall", and also he did the
monologue from "Midnight Express" which was, eh, incredibly impressive,
actually. Actually, he was quite brilliant doing it, so he was very easy to
choose.

[As Gilmour's solo starts, we see brief scenes of Pink's wedding.] This is
a classic sort-of sixties wedding. Particularly horrific, actually. You
know how everybody looks, I think everybody hated looking that way, but
that's how everybody *did* look.

[The solo continues, and we see Pink lighting a ball of hash.] We had to
get drugs in somewhere. I think Bob's never done drugs in his life. He
didn't even know what he had to do with the... "Is there anybody in there?"
she says. [She says, "Is there anybody in there."] I followed pretty
closely the original. We had re-juggled certain songs, and when the film
was done other work had to be done. But pretty well most of it, it already
existed or it was already mixed for the movie. A very, very tiny percentage
was added afterwards. [Pink and his manager walk through an airport.] Bob
Hoskins--very easy to direct. Ad libbing like mad. What with no script,
what else could he do?

[We see Pink participating in an anti-nuclear rally as Roger sings, "Mother
will she tear your little boy--"] This sequence is Pink away from home, his
wife finding someone else. And whether his problems are real or imaginary,
no one really knows.

[The film shows Pink watching from the sidelines as others dance.] Pink as
a young boy, alienated and isolated. Finally he gets to dance with the only
person that wasn't asked to dance. Pink and his inability to deal with
women. Pretty simple really, I suppose, in what we're trying to say. [The
girl stands to dance with him, but it much taller than Pink.] A little bit
of humour. Not much of that in the film.

[The telephone rings repeatedly.] Pink tries to get in touch with his wife,
and a man answers the phone. Probably everybody's nightmare. Phone gets put
down. Pink's a long way away in America. [Operator says, "There must be
someone else there besides your wife, sir, to answer" and the connection is
cut off.] Lost.

And now we mix to one of the most powerful images in Gerry Scarfe's
animation. This animation that follows was actually originally done for the
show, and probably one of--if not *the*--most significant reason why I
actually wanted to do the movie. I think Gerry Scarfe's animation that
follows here is *so* powerful. I tracked back the camera and then went up
into the ceiling into blackness in order to take us into the animation. And
there you have two flowers sussing one another out and then making love and
then destroying one another. Vicious animation. Unpleasant animation, but
hugely powerful. All this was part of the original show. It's pretty well
thought-out how we went out of live action into animation; almost
everything was actually very finely worked out. And as we went along, the
animation took longer than the live action anyway, so we could adapt. We
went back and redid a couple of scenes that made the movement into the
animation that much more cohesive. But in the end, it was pretty well
thought out beforehand...

[Roger begins to sing "What Shall We Do Now?" The animation pans across a
wall in which the front of cars and other material things are embedded.]
This animation of the sort of consumer society I suppose that we were all
barraged with after the war, and the meaningless of it all, was done
afterwards. It was actually an adaption of something that they had done
before, Roger and Gerry. This was redone for the film. Simplistically done,
really, when you look at it now. Some of the animation is so sophisticated,
and some is so simplistic. In a hurry to get things done, some things work
and some don't.

[In the animation, one guy bashes another's brains out.] This is some of
the more violent imagery. Simplistic, but very powerful...

["What Shall We Do Now?" ends. Someone smashes a storefront window with a
hammer.] This is what we've come to call the broader issue, which was to
take ourselves out of the rather selfish and manic plight of one rock 'n'
roll star, to show that his own personal alienation and everything was not
just totally his own, but actually relevant to something else that was
happening out there in the world. The broader issue is something that
reoccurs all the way through the film, but kinda got cut out a lot in the
end. ["Young Lust" begins.] But it was something that we tried to show,
take it away so it wasn't just a boring, selfish rock 'n' roll star worried
about his own life...

[The guitar solo to "Young Lust" begins as the film shows the female
groupies partying with roadies.] This is classic rock 'n' roll, all the
imagery of cliche of rock 'n' roll and its success, whether it be sexual or
the whole demagoguery of it all, just adding up to the role that rock 'n'
roll stars find themselves in. It can be humorous and interesting, but
ultimately meaningless, of course. [And American groupie puts a shirt on,
with a back stage pass.] People will do anything for a backstage pass. This
was all recreated at Pinewood Studios. It wasn't a rock 'n' roll concert at
all. Jenny Wright plays the girl who will ultimately hitch up with Pink as
the __?__ limousine goes by.  And the very precious backstage pass... We
always had the music playing, whatever we did.

["Young Lust" ends. The groupie asks Pink, "Are all these your guitars?"]
This particular scene here with Pink in his hotel room was one of the very
few conventional scenes that we did, in that it was dialogue obviously.
This was a sequence in the original album, which was slightly over-the-top
in many ways, but actually we had to make it more realistic. It's one of
the very few scenes which were conventionally shot. I mean, and this is a
melodramatic scene and I did it that way. He's watching a TV film which is
"The Dambusters" which is a very famous English film which we all grew up
with and saw too many times. Probably why Roger originally envisioned it.
And it's the groupie coming back to the hotel room for the rock 'n' roll
star. It's a cliche situation which is on the original album, and this is
the dramatic interpretation of it.

["Oh wow! Look at this tub! You wanna take a bath?"] I think that it wasn't
so much Bob thinking of himself as Pink. He certainly never thought of
himself as Roger Waters 'cos you couldn't hope for two more different
people. Understanding, rock 'n' roll star coming back to the hotel room,
and all the problems that the film tries to elucidate on, and having a
groupie close by: he might well have understood that. In the end, he was
acting.

[Roger sings, "Day after day, love turns gray" and the groupie begins to
gently suck Pink's fingers.] Her sucking his fingers was something that I
did on the day. It's sexual without being sexual, I suppose. And actually
quite powerful, from a dramatic point of view. But he's still completely
and utterly separate from everything. Lost in his own world, which then
erupts into complete violence...

[Pink starts trashing the hotel room. Roger sings, "This is just a passing
phase, one of my bad days."] This scene took very little time to do,
actually. I mean, you have one set that you can destroy, and we destroyed
all of it. Bob went at it like a crazy person, really. Very violent,
considering he's not a violent person at all. He found it hard to do, but
he did it for me. And he hurt himself doing it. It's made up of many shots.
He cut himself quite severely as we were doing this, and you can see we
ultimately cover his hand up with a rag because he was bleeding so much,
and he couldn't, he just could pick up anything anymore. He cut himself
actually on the wooden slats, and by the time he pulls down the blinds in
the window, his hand is covered in a rag because he was bleeding so much.

[It's easy to spot the moment Geldof injured himself. Watch for him to
smash through some wooden blinds on a closet door, and then throw the door
open. Immediately after he pushes the door aside, he reflexively jerks his
hand away and looks at it. From then on, he has a blue rag wrapped around
his hand for the rest of that scene.]

[Roger sings, "Would ya like to call the cops?"] And he threw the TV
outside. We're still at the set in Pinewood now. [The film shows the city
below his hotel room.] And that's blue screen film of Los Angeles. Could do
that better now. All of this was the second unit we did in Los Angeles.

["Don't Leave Me Now" begins as we draw back from the destroyed room.] And
then the aftermath of all that violence turns into something quite
beautiful, in a very perverse way. I particularly like these scenes, in
that we were faced with this completely demolished set. And there he is
lying in the pool at the top of a, make-believe really, hotel in Los
Angeles. I'm sure there are similar ones, but this is our creation.

[Roger sings, "Ooh, babe/ Don't leave me now" as the wife and her lover
have sex.] Love scenes are always very difficult to film actually in that,
you know, it's two people rolling around in a bed. It's actually not a bad
love scene as love scenes go. But in the end it's a whole bunch of people
sitting around a camera watching, which is always very perverse. But you
get to do it, it's like a job of work, really. We try to make it as
sensuous--what we did is to play music as loudly as possible so that it
takes the edge off a bit. [Roger sings, "--to a pulp on a Saturday night/
oh babe!"] That's Pink in his hotel room, and the blood drops down.
Actually that was Oxford Scientific. It was milk originally. We made it red.

And then we come back to this very surreal room, which was a gigantic room
that we built at Pinewood Studios. And then on top of that, Gerald Scarfe
animated the shadows. [We draw back from Pink sitting in his chair by the
window.] This actually is not animated at the moment. This is her actually
walking into the room, shadow--and *then* he animates into this horrific
figure of his wife, his imagination of what she means to him, fearful as he
is of her and her sexual control of him. In today's terms you would do it
very differently, but in those days all we did was to build a gigantic
room, out of proportion and out of perspective also. Bob ran away to an
imagined image which was then added afterwards in very simple animation...

[Pink smashes the television again, and Roger sings, "I don't need to arms
around me!"] Most of the imagery that you see in this sequence, which is
really the broader issue of things which we tried to do a great deal, which
shows the violence outside of just the individual sitting there in the
hotel room. Originally it went with a piece on the album called "Hey You"
which doesn't find itself in the film. But so, the imagery was very strong
and that's why it's here. This is a recut we did after we finished the
film. It wasn't that we didn't *like* "Hey You." I mean, "Hey You" is
brilliant I think, particularly Gilmour's guitar piece within it. It's just
that it seemed that it interrupted the narrative flow, and therefore that's
the reason it went out. It's to do with the film more than the music. I
always liked it as a piece of music. These images then were adapted into
"Another Brick In The Wall, Part 3." They were too good to lose and they
still said a great deal.

[Stills from the footage for "Hey You" appear in the very rare book of "The
Wall." The film was to show rioting mobs throwing Molotov cocktails at
police in riot gear. Most of the stills can be seen at
http://memes.com/~tristandcw/heyyou_film.html but you can also see some
brief clips in the film during "Another Brick, part 3."]

[Roger sings "Goodbye Cruel World" while Pink sits blankly in his hotel
staring at the wall.] Now we're back to Oxford Scientific, and the wall,
the imaginary wall. The wall that alienates him from everything, from
everybody he knows and all of his emotions and everything. And that wall
gradually become so large that he can't deal with it. Now we try and
resolve some of the imageries that we've seen before, the young boy running
on a rugby field.

[Pink faces the wall, which recedes into the distance.] You can see the
wall going off in perspective in some of these shots. Some of these you'd
probably do a lot better today. It was meant to be going off into the
distance forever. [The first synth pad of "Is There Anybody Out There"
enters.] All of this wall is built at Pinewood in a very small stage
actually. We wish we could have built it like fifty times longer, 'cos it's
meant to be huge. It was high; it was as high as you could probably get at
any film studio. In the end, it's a set, you know. And you can see the
optical sections added on, which you'd do much better now. [The acoustic
guitar begins playing.] In those days we didn't know how.

Then you come to the aftermath of the smashed-up bedroom which--I love
these scenes. [Pink arranges the contents of his room into a neurotic,
bizarre artistic organization.] It's a very beautiful piece of artwork,
really, which was done by Brian Morris, the production designer, to make
something beautiful out of the manic, out of something so ugly. And a work
of art comes from the debris of him smashing up the entire room. It's just
his descent into madness, and out of madness can sometimes come some
perverse beauty. A lot of this story is obviously Roger's own personal
story from a narrative point-of-view, growing up and his father dying in
the war and all of the repression of growing up post-war. Not so unusual or
so unique to Waters, but relevant to a lot of people, particularly out of
English rock 'n' roll people, you know, post-war, and what formed them and
therefore what identified their work. A great deal of the madness, the
manic qualities of this story, are relevant to, as much to, not Syd Barrett
who was the original member of Pink Floyd, but to Roger's relationship with
him, in that probably Roger thought that he would go as crazy as Syd
Barrett, 'cos Syd Barrett actually became mentally disturbed by being a
rock 'n' roll star. [The song ends.] But so much of this character of Pink
in the room and his craziness, so much of it is Syd, or Roger's fear of
being Syd or ending up as Syd. And so much of their observations of Syd are
actually what the Pink character becomes. It ceases to be really Roger
Waters, and becomes Roger Waters' fear of being Syd Barrett, or ending up
as Syd Barrett.

The shaving sequence is, it began as the extremity of madness really. It's
quite common for people who are disturbed in this way to actually want to
get rid of all their bodily hair. In fact, Syd Barrett had done the same.
He had shaved his head. I think this is an image that Roger had in his mind
when he was thinking about all of this. It's really just to punish himself
in some way.

[Part one of the film on laser disk ends. Part two begins.]

[Voices on television: "It's most disappointing. I shall have to go all out
on some modifications." "I wonder if I could ask--"] Now into Pink in his
room again, back to the movie "The Dambusters." ["Nobody Home" begins.]
English Second World War film that we all knew, and then Pink watching TV.

[Roger sings: "I've got the obligatory Hendrix perm--"] This is a surreal
landscape that's inspired by one of Gerry Scarfe's drawings. We recreated
it back at Barnstaple in the sand dunes. Here we are back at "The
Dambusters." The dog is called Nigger, but in American versions of it of
course it's much more politically correct. This is a very crude piece of
metamorphosis, really. I'm sure you'd do that much, much more differently
now. In those days it's just a straight mix, very simple mix. The clouds
are real. They weren't put in afterwards.

["There's still nobody home... I got"] We started out in the sands, and we
went into the tunnel, and we came out of the tunnel, and now we're into
what was in fact a disused biscuit factory actually in Hammersmith in
London, which we made into this weird insane asylum hospital. But all part
of Pink's nightmare. We're in complete surreal world. All of this was
recreated in this disused factory.

[Enter a heartbeat sound.] Quite strong imagery, really. I mean, the camera
always low and always angled, and you see all the graphic shapes that
happen once you're at that angle. [Young Pink faces insane adult Pink, and
runs away.] Just the young Pink visiting the death of the battlefield,
which was obviously very strong in his mind because of the death of his
father. These are more images of the First World War than the Second, as
it's truthful to say. Most of these were taken from black and white
photographs of the First World War, and then recreated.

[On the television: "You want me, Crosby?" "I'm sorry, sir. It's Nigger.
He's been run over. He's dead." "The car didn't even stop."] We're still in
the sand dunes in the south of England.

[Roger sings: "Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn? Remember--"] The
railway station is in Yorkshire, done completely differently, weeks and
weeks apart. Yorkshire again because that's the only place where you can
get a real old steam train these days to recreate the soldiers coming home,
and Pink hopeful that his father might be one of them. But of course he
isn't, 'cos he's dead. And in this surreal way he just wanders through the
smoke, into this scene.

[Roger sings: "Vera, Vera, what has become of you? Does--"] Almost, I would
say, eighty percent of the film is hand-held, actually. It was just a phase
I was going through, I suppose. Also, I had a particularly good operator
who could hold the camera very steady and move it without it looking the
usual hand-held jogging up and down.

[Drummers begin drumming.] The Boys' Brigade, which is what these kids are
here with their--in the uniforms, was something from my past. But we gave a
military aspect to it. "Bring the Boys Back Home" was a piece that Roger
put in afterwards.... Again the imagery of the soldiers going away was
something that I saw whilst we were there in previous scenes, and grabbed
that shot. A very powerful graphic shot. These scenes of the soldiers
singing were conducted by Dave Gilmour on one of two occasions that he came
to the set.

["Wrong! Do it again!"] Back at Pinewood studios in Pink's hotel room.

["Comfortably Numb" plays. Gilmour sings: "A distant ship, smoke on the
horizon."] "Comfortably Numb," which is really principally Gilmour's piece
of music with Roger's lyrics, is how we resolve the importance of this
strange thing, the only thing the kid seems to have befriended his entire
young life. [The first guitar solo starts.] It often was a balance images
against sound. There the sound is delicate, the imagery is delicate.

[The next verse passes, and Gilmour sings: "A distant ship, smoke on the
horizon. You are only--"] All this was shot in London, all at the sides of
the canals. Then in his delirium, Pink remembers his childhood and these
strange images that come towards him, they're based on Gerry Scarfe's
drawings which are like, just grotesque caricatures really of the people
that were involved with Pink, be they the doctor, or be they the mother or
father. They revisit him in his delirium. There was like a line of eight
people dressed up. In the end I cut it down to the principal people in
their lives. There was a whole bunch of them that were made up to look like
Gerry Scarfe's drawings, but in, I minimized so much more of that than
they'd originally planned, just to keep it real, so that it didn't become
just too crazy. 'Cos if you lose your thread of reality, then the audience
becomes too confused.

[The ending guitar solo begins.] One drawing from Gerry could give you a
five-minute sequence that I then could take further cinematically. But the
original thought that went into it was originally from Roger's words and
music, and then into Gerry's brain, which was pretty extraordinary. To make
it cinematic, that was my job. And I like to say "action" and "cut" and
"actually what is it that we do now?" And out of that came twenty great
images that weren't ___ of those, but it was hugely collaborative.

I never made student films, and ___ said this was the most expensive
student film ever made. In making a film as you go along, albeit hugely
expensive film at the time, it was a pleasure that not too many people are
able to do as a director.

Most of this stuff was back to the old biscuit factory in West London,
which was done when it was very cold. The weather was terrible and Bob
hated being covered in slime, but he was very brave. Well, actually he
wasn't that brave. He complained all the time, and complained greatly to
me. Mind you he's, when you look at it it's hardly surprising really. It's
just to show the decay of someone's mind and body and the whole
accumulation of the madness. When you feel that your whole body is not
yours any more, and your skin is just slipping away from you, and you want
to tear away at it. [Pink and company march down the hall towards the
arena.] And actually what you tear away at reveals something of you that
you don't, which is your absolute horrible form of yourself, which is what
this is meant to show, as Pink finally slips into the ultimate of his
nightmare, which is this figure which is just such a manic, fascist
controller over a demented audience, which is really to show Pink as a rock
'n' roll star and his complete and utter contempt and alienation from
everybody, mostly the audience, even though he has to go out there on stage
and still perform, which is Roger's metaphor.

["In The Flesh" begins] A lot of people misunderstood this in that it was
meant to be the actual worst that we could show, really. That's actually
where rock 'n' roll can go. And the rock 'n' roll performer as
manipulative, a politician almost, in the most horriffic was that we could
do, which is actually the ultimate in fascist theatrics. It's all about
hate, and about the fact that audiences sometimes revere the wrong people,
sometimes rock 'n' roll stars. [Pink sings, "So ya, thought ya--"]  It's
the worst that you can think of yourself if you *are* a rock 'n' roll star,
which is what Roger was getting at, and your complete and utter contempt
for the mindlessness of audiences that cheer your every move, even though
you might be a completely and utterly hateful human being. [Pink sings,
"I've got some bad news for you, sunshine!"]

The audience here is predominantly Skinheads from London. Anybody who looks
almost real is from the American schools in London, but the rest of them
are from the east end of London. There are real, very right-wing and
fascist Skinheads we brought in to be actors. The thing is that... they
weren't acting for a lot of the time. So it's kind of scarey really,
because they kind of got off on what we were doing, even though we were
trying to be critical. But that's always a difficulty in film, trying to
show something that is meant to be madness and stupidity in the most
extreme form. Trouble is that these--I mean, particularly when we come to
the more violent episodes--you didn't have to tell those Skinheads how to
beat somebody up. That's how they did it. It was all for-real. It was kind
of hard pulling them off of people, 'cos there aren't any stunts in these
scenes. These are all real Skinhead kids.

["In the Flesh" enters the final few bars] We had plenty of stunt ment
looking after everybody, but you can't look after them once they go wild.
You can choreograph a scene--as a matter of fact the assistant direct was
screaming at them all day long; he lost his voice in the end. But it's
like, in the end you're kind of in control as film makers. Much of what you
see it completely and utterly in control, but there are scenes which are
somewhat out of control. And [producer] Alan Marshall would scream, "Cut!"
They didn't stop. Out of it comes this surreal and nightmarish vision, is
what it was meant to be.

["Run Like Hell" has begun] As you go into "Run Like Hell." "Run Like Hell"
again is another Gilmour piece, this sort of pseudo-fascist disco really,
which is what we're going for, which is to show the brainlessness of people
who follow rock 'n' roll stars top the very extreme. You can be brainwashed
into it, the thing that we so easily identify with as evil, which is a
fascist rally. And we choreographed it to be almost this ludicrous Nazi
disco really. To show the ugliness and the power and the hideousness and
the thoughtlessness when you just listen to whoever is up on the stage, and
become your god or your political leader, when rock 'n' roll turn us, is
probably what Roger was trying to say. And we show many images of the same
kind of evil. Some of the uglier images in the film are here, just to
demonstrate the blackness of everything, the extreme that things can go to,
whether it be a Pakistani family that's evicted... And again, the Skinheads
which were prevalent when we made this film. These Skinheads were
everywhere in London. We didn't make them up. None of these people are [cut
out?] in makeup. That's how they were.

[Roger sings, "And if you're taking your--"] We see the couple kissing, the
multiracial couple in the back, suddenly the Black kid is dragged out by
these Skinheads. These Skinheads actually did that in their normal lives,
and suddenly we were asking them to reenact scenes, which became very
difficult at times. We were overlapping what is in fact the reality of the
world we found ourselves in, and yet we were creating an illusion, you
know? It was meant to be a movie. But those kids, those Skinheads were a
pretty scarey bunch. ["Run Like Hell" ends.]

["Waiting for the Worms" begins. Pink shouts, "To smash in their window and
kick in their--"] You know, when Roger did the original album, him ranting
and raving into a microphone in the film studio, then we had to recreate
[it] with Geldof shouting away into a megaphone the same kind of hideous
nastiness that Roger originally created. And then Gerry Scarfe's screams
and violent imagery intercut with that fulfill the complete madness of
everything, culminating in the marching hammers.

[The hammers march while Pink rants.] The whole marching hammers sequence
was actually done originally *before* the movie, for the show. In the
show--where they build this gigantic imaginary wall, which then becomes an
amazing screen really--these hammers were projected with three projectors
in synch, huge triptych which the concert audience saw in front of them.
This was all part of the original show, these marching hammers. And the
madness culminates in Pink screaming to stop.

[Pink screams, "Stoooooop!" Guard washes his hands in lavatory.] And now
we're back in Pinewood studios. This is a set, as we try and find Pink, who
has disappeared from back stage. The show about to go on, this is the show
that--we've just seen the show that he imagined, his worst fears, his worst
nightmare. And we find Pink [__?__] just in a bathroom stall; the security
guard takes us to him. Looking at his notebook where he's scrawled his same
kind of poems that he wrote when he was a kid with the teacher. And then he
plaintively sings this odd verse which Roger had written. Bob sings it,
which takes us into the final animated section which is "The Trial," as the
whole guy's life comes before him for people to make judgment on him. [Pink
mumbles, "I wanna go home..." etc. The door creaks open.] This trial
sequence was pretty well intact from that which they projected on the wall
at the original concert.

A lot of the people that worked with me had worked with me before. It was
actually a very tricky film in so much as I shot with two cameras, two
strong cameras--not just one camera doing the main thing and the second
camera just picking off whatever they could get. It was conceived for two
cameras. The camera operator--the *main* camera operator--had worked with
me quite considerably before, particularly on "Midnight Express." Because a
great deal of the film is hand-held, John Stanier is the camera operator
who did it. He is the most brilliant hand-held camera, in so much as it's
not the old shakey stuff that, you know, coming down the staircase
hand-held, but to be able to release the camera from the tyrrany of the
dolly, and be able to do quite sophistocated shots which are not shakey,
but in a way more creative in a way that we had done already in "Midnight
Express," to be able to do that every day. And then also the second camera
could do the more conventional dolly shots, et cetera. So I had those
people, you know, most of the people who worked on the film actually worked
with me before. The most important person was the editor, Gerry Hambling,
who was completely and utterly disinterested in what Roger and I might be
having arguments about. In the end, the film is the film. He has materials
that he could cut through. He's far and away the most, the greatest cutter
of film against music in the world, in my opinion. And *he* is the one that
really, truely transformed what I had in mind and what Roger had in mind,
and I think that even though Roger and I had our disagreements, probably
anything that Roger and I would agree about is how brilliantly Gerry
Hambling cut the film.

[The mother asks the judge, "Him, me, alone."] He never wanted to do the
conventional shot because we were never doing a conventional film. So every
day we would figure out, how would we do this? Now that we're not trapped
by conventional dialogue or a conventional screen play, and how to use the
came in an interesting an innovative way. The truth is that whilst making
this, I'd seen [A__?___]'s "Napoleon" and there was so much that he did
that was so much fresher than *anything* you see in film today, that it
kind of spurred you to doing different things with the camera, to try and
communicate in a different way, which the whole reason to do the film in
the first place, whether it be hanging the camera from the ceiling of the
studio on a pendulum to many things that we attempted and tried. Some we
threw away, but  always it was to try and do it, to push the extremity of
what we knew and what was available with regards to how our camera can
capture what's in front of it, to do it in a fresh and original way, and to
be just exciting, really, when you're not trapped by the confines of a
conventional movie, because this film didn't belong to anything that had
been done before. You know? Maybe *since*, in many ways. And in that
regard, we were free, and so we could think freely in everything that we
shot.

Gerry's animation,and Gerry's vision of that--in that were the clues of
where we might go with regards to the live action. But nobody had done it,
and we weren't dealing with animation. I can't deal with drawing that spend
months on figuring out where--I've got to shoot a scene that day, so you
have to figure out what you can do with a camera and the elements that you
have, to try and justify it or to match what is being done either in the
animation or Gerry had originally drawn in these *extraordinary* innovative
and surreal and quite frankly weird paintings. And so to match that in live
action was actually a challenge for all of us doing that part of it.

In the end, the genesis of the whole thing was the work, and the work was
an album, and the album was already out there, as was the show. It had a
structure and it had a logic. The problem was, cinematically, that a great
deal of the logic was not explained. If you lay out the entire lyrics that
Roger had written, they don't make easy sense. They make, but it doesn't
make *easy* sense. So it was a matter of re-ordering things and giving
cinematic flesh to Roger's original thoughts.

As he talked more when we had these meetings, these things became clearer,
and they becema clearer to me because I was the one who was trying to make
it cinematic, not theatrical. Because a theatrical experience is very
different to actually watching a movie.

[The wall explodes.] Before the explosion of the wall and hopefully then
the pulling down of the barriers that were built around this one
individual, which wasn't so much about *his* particular barriers, whether
they be his emotional barriers of the way in which he deals with other
human beings--it was meant to be the barriers that we all build around
ourselves, really. All the walls that we build up. And the explosion was to
release us from that, and the explosion of it is not enough. And so I
always wanted to put on the end a scene of hope that, in the horriffic
world that we find ourselves in, like a bunch of kids actually picking up
those bricks, which in the end is the future.

And maybe one of the things they pick up happens to be a Molotov cocktail,
which is a bottle with gas in it with a wick, and the innocent kid just
takes it out and sniffs it and throws it away. Because life goes on. It was
meant to show some hope in what is in fact a pretty nihilistic piece
otherwise. Hopefully there's some redemption in that.

["Outside the Wall" plays and the credits roll.]