“I’m fed up with all that”: the action stars that Roger Waters couldn’t stand
Roger Waters never saw his role as an artist to be confined to one medium. He may have started as one of the greatest storytellers in rock and roll as part of Pink Floyd, but the minute that he started working outside of his legendary bandmates, he started to see the boundaries that could be pushed if he was left to his own devices. That meant a different approach to everything from stage shows to silver screen experiences, but his time at the movies always had to give him something different than a simple paint-by-numbers cinematic experience.
But, really, was anyone expecting anything less than the person who had a hands-on approach to every aspect of The Wall film? Waters himself may have had some reservations about how the movie turned out later on, but there was always certain imagery that will forever be burned into the minds of every moviegoer who saw it, from the shots of humanoids in gas masks during the ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ sequence or those foreboding hammers walking in lockstep with each other.
While the film itself is a fine artistic companion to the album version, it’s not like Waters had the best grasp on the medium either. He was more than happy to make the kind of abstract movies that he was soundtracking for during Pink Floyd’s prime, like their contributions to the film More, but by the time he had left Pink Floyd, the entire cinematic playing field had changed once the blockbusters started rolling in.
People had only recently got interested in what big-budget adventure movies like Jaws could deliver, and now that the biggest names in music were MTV darlings, filmmaking also changed to reflect that kind of over-the-top imagery, whether that was making everything more operatic and grandiose or turning the entire movie into what felt like one long music video, like Flashdance.
“It’s so dull today. It’s so faddish and formula.”
roger waters
But coinciding with the high-budget adventure films were also the hardened badasses of the silver screen. Sylvester Stallone may have already shown people how to be a stoic badass in the late 1970s, but by the time people saw the first Die Hard movie or saw Arnold Schwarzenegger kicking ass and taking names every time he was onscreen, it almost became expected that these main characters would settle arguments with their fists rather than words.
And while there was a time and place for that kind of performance, Waters couldn’t be asked to return to that brand of movie, saying, “When I go to the cinema, I don’t want to see [expletive] Bruce Willis. I’m fed up with all that crap. I want to be moved by something. I want to come out of the cinema-going, ‘Jesus Christ!’ and be really struck dumb or moved… It’s so dull today. It’s so faddish and formula.”
Looking at the kind of projects that he made in the meantime, though, it’s not like Waters wasn’t walking the walk, either. A record like Amused to Death wasn’t meant to be the kind of blockbuster album in the same way that Pink Floyd’s records were, and while it might have taken some time for most people to get into it, the imagery of a society that’s reduced down to rubble by technology was far more striking than any boilerplate pop tune.
It’s not like the biggest names in pop music or in Hollywood didn’t have their place, either. They could make people satisfied in the moment and have a few action scenes that few could match, but for Waters, it was better to leave the audience with something to think about rather than a gauntlet of different fight scenes.
