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.Īnd as I listened to *The Wall album it was clear that it had dramatic possibilities. I first came to Pink Floyd’s album The Wall as a fan. Or maybe, brilliant caricaturist that Gerry is himself, he probably thought the make-up man’s draftsmanship rather inferior. He had spent his life being cruel to others in his own cartoon work and probably never experienced anyone depicting him in this way.
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. It was labeled “Roger, the school bully and his nasty pal Inky”. 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. 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. 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. But the making of the film was too miserable an exercise for me to gain any pleasure from looking back at the process. It’s not that I’m ashamed or displeased with the result. 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. PINK FLOYD THE WALL The making of the film, brick by brick