Pink Floyd – The Wall


Pink Floyd – The Wall is a 1982 British live-action/animated musical surrealist drama film directed by Alan Parker, based on Pink Floyd's 1979 studio album The Wall. The screenplay was written by Pink Floyd vocalist and bassist Roger Waters, with animation sequences directed by Gerald Scarfe. The Boomtown Rats' lead vocalist Bob Geldof made his film debut as rock star Pink, who, driven to neurosis by the pressures of stardom and traumatic events in his life, constructs an emotional and mental wall to protect himself. However, this coping mechanism eventually backfires, and Pink demands to be set free.
Like its associated album, the film is highly metaphorical, and frequently uses both visual and auditory symbolism throughout. It features little dialogue, instead being driven by the music from the album throughout. The songs used in the film have several differences from their album versions, and two of the songs included, "When the Tigers Broke Free" and "What Shall We Do Now?", do not appear on the album. Despite its turbulent production, the film received generally positive reviews, with praise for its music and animation, and it has an established cult following among Pink Floyd fans.

Plot

Pink is a depressed rock star who appears motionless and expressionless while remembering his father. Decades prior, in Pink's infancy, his father was killed defending the Anzio beachhead during World War II, leaving Pink's overbearing mother to raise him alone. A young Pink discovers relics from his father's military service and death. An animation depicts the brutality of war. Pink places a bullet on the track of an oncoming train within a tunnel, and the train that passes has cattle-trucks full of children peering out of the windows wearing expressionless face masks.
At school, he is caught writing poems and is humiliated by the teacher, who reads a poem from Pink's book before disciplining him. However, it is revealed that the poor treatment of the students is because of the unhappiness of the teacher's strained marriage. Pink recalls an oppressive school system, imagining children falling into a meat grinder. He fantasises about the children rising in rebellion and burning down the school before throwing the teacher onto a bonfire.
As an adult, Pink remembers his overprotective mother and his strained marriage. During a phone call, Pink realises that his wife is cheating on him when a man answers the phone. His traumatic experiences are represented as "bricks" in the wall he constructs around himself that emotionally isolates him.
Pink returns to his hotel room with a groupie, only to destroy the room in a fit of violence, scaring her away. Depressed, he thinks about his wife and feels trapped in his room. He then remembers every "brick" of his wall, as it is shown to be finally complete, and the film returns to the first scene.
Now trapped inside his wall, Pink does not leave his hotel room and begins to lose his mind to metaphorical "worms". He shaves all his body hair and watches television, particularly the epic docudrama war film The Dam Busters. The young Pink searches through the trenches of the war, eventually finding himself as an adult. Young Pink runs away in terror and appears at a railway station, with the soldiers being reunited with their loved ones, but failing to find his father. In the present, Pink's manager finds him in his hotel room, unresponsive, and has a paramedic inject him with drugs to enable him to perform.
In this drugged-out state, Pink hallucinates himself as a fascist dictator and his concert as a neo-Nazi rally in London. His followers attack black people, gays, and Jews. He imagines marching hammers goose-stepping across ruins. Pink stops hallucinating and screams, "Stop!", deciding he no longer wants to be trapped behind the wall. He cowers in a bathroom stall, quietly singing to himself as a security guard walks past him. As an animated rag doll, Pink puts himself on trial for "showing feelings of an almost human nature". His teacher and wife both accuse and berate him for his actions, while his mother tries to take him home, because she doesn't want him to get in any trouble.
As judge, Pink sentences himself "to be exposed before his peers", and gives the order to "tear down the wall!". Following a prolonged silence, the wall is destroyed, and Pink screams in terror. While Pink's ultimate fate is left unknown, children can be seen cleaning up a pile of debris and grabbing bricks, with one of them emptying a Molotov cocktail.

Cast

Concept

In the mid-1970s, as Pink Floyd gained mainstream fame, songwriter Roger Waters began feeling increasingly alienated from his audiences:
Audiences at those vast concerts are there for an excitement which, I think, has to do with the love of success. When a band or a person becomes an idol, it can have to do with the success that that person manifests, not the quality of work he produces. You don't become a fanatic because somebody's work is good, you become a fanatic to be touched vicariously by their glamour and fame. Stars—film stars, rock 'n' roll stars—represent, in myth anyway, the life as we'd all like to live it. They seem at the very centre of life. And that's why audiences still spend large sums of money at concerts where they are a long, long way from the stage, where they are often very uncomfortable, and where the sound is often very bad.

Waters was also dismayed by the "executive approach", which was only about success, not even attempting to get acquainted with the actual persons of whom the band was composed. The concept of the wall, along with the decision to name the lead character "Pink", partly grew out of that approach, combined with the issue of the growing alienation between the band and their fans. This symbolised a new era for rock bands, as Pink Floyd explored "the hard realities of 'being where we are'", echoing ideas of alienation described by existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre.

Development

Even before the original Pink Floyd album was recorded, the intention was to make a film from it. The original plan was for the film to be live footage from the album's tour, together with animations directed by Gerald Scarfe and extra scenes, and for Waters himself to star. EMI did not intend to make the film, as they did not understand the concept.
Director Alan Parker, a Pink Floyd fan, asked EMI whether The Wall could be adapted to film. EMI suggested that Parker talk to Waters, who had asked Parker to direct the film. Parker instead suggested that he produce it and give the directing task to Gerald Scarfe and Michael Seresin, a cinematographer. Waters began work on the film's screenplay after studying scriptwriting books. He and Scarfe produced a special-edition book containing the screenplay and art to pitch the project to investors. While the book depicted Waters in the role of Pink, after screen tests, he was removed from the starring role and replaced with new wave musician and frontman of the Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof. In Behind the Wall, both Waters and Geldof later admitted to a story during casting where Geldof and his manager took a taxi to an airport, and Geldof's manager pitched the role to the singer, who continued to reject the offer and express his contempt for the project throughout the journey, unaware that the taxi driver was Waters' brother, who told Waters about Geldof's opinion.
Since Waters was no longer in the starring role, it no longer made sense for the feature to include Pink Floyd footage, so the live film aspect was dropped. The footage culled from the five Wall concerts at Earl's Court from 13–17 June 1981 that were held specifically for filming was deemed unusable also for technical reasons as the fast lenses needed for the low light levels turned out to have insufficient resolution for the movie screen. Complex parts such as "Hey You" still had not been properly shot by the end of the live shows. Parker convinced Waters and Scarfe that the concert footage was too theatrical and that it would jar with the animation and stage live action. After the concert footage was dropped, Seresin left the project and Parker became sole director.
Finance came in part from a British bank.

Filming

Parker, Waters and Scarfe frequently clashed during production, and Parker described the filming as "one of the most miserable experiences of my creative life." Scarfe declared that he would drive to Pinewood Studios carrying a bottle of Jack Daniel's, because "I had to have a slug before I went in the morning, because I knew what was coming up, and I knew I had to fortify myself in some way." Waters said that filming was "a very unnerving and unpleasant experience".
During production, while filming the destruction of a hotel room, Geldof suffered a cut to his hand as he pulled away the Venetian blinds. The footage remains in the film. It was discovered while filming the pool scenes that Geldof did not know how to swim. Interiors were shot at Pinewood Studios, and it was suggested that they suspend Geldof in Christopher Reeve's clear cast used for the Superman flying sequences, but his frame was too small by comparison; it was then decided to make a smaller rig that was a more acceptable fit, and he lay on his back. In Nicholas Schaffner's book Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey it is claimed that the body cast from the film Supergirl was actually used instead.
The war scenes were shot on Saunton Sands in North Devon, which was also featured on the cover of Pink Floyd's A Momentary Lapse of Reason six years later.