alan parker, pink floyd the wall. the making of the film, brick by brick

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PINK FLOYD THE WALL THE MAKING OF THE FILM, BRICK BY BRICK 1 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.]

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Page 1: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.]

Page 2: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 3: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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

Page 4: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 5: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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

Page 6: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 7: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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

Page 8: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 9: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 10: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 11: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 12: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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

Page 13: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

‗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

Page 14: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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

Page 15: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 16: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 17: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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

Page 18: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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!‖

Page 19: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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

Page 20: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 21: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 22: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 23: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 24: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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

Page 25: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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.

Page 26: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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

Page 27: Alan Parker, Pink Floyd the Wall. the Making of the Film, Brick by Brick

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