Roger Waters on his disappointment with ‘The Wall’ movie: “It’s my fault more than anybody’s”
Any creative project often looks much better in the creator’s head after it’s released. From the moment it’s out of their hands and into the world, the biggest names in music, movies, and other art forms are quick to point out what they could have done differently or highlight the cracks in the final version. While Roger Waters had significant control over most of Pink Floyd’s output during the making of The Wall, he felt that the accompanying film didn’t allow him enough room to fully express his vision.
That said, it’s not like Waters didn’t get his way whenever he realised the past Floyd concepts. All of the lyrical pieces had primarily been from him, starting on Dark Side of the Moon, and Animals may have been one of his more biting commentaries on the modern world before he decided to close himself off from it.
Then again, The Wall marked the moment where Waters’ dictating got the better of him. The album sleeve might say the name Pink Floyd on the cover, but this is more Waters’ vision featuring the members of Pink Floyd, and even that’s being diplomatic since Waters fired Richard Wright when he wasn’t playing to his standards.
While the group may have tolerated that behaviour in the studio, a film is a far more collaborative project. Since the treatment for Waters’ vision included everything from animations to live-action re-enactments of a rock concert, that meant that a lot of directors had to have their say in the final matter.
If anything, David Gilmour should be commended more than anyone else for giving us the movie version of The Wall. Since Waters began to stick his nose into places it didn’t belong during the film’s production, Gilmour was the one who told him that the directors were there for a reason and insisted that they be given a greater say in how it should be portrayed on the big screen.
Looking back on it, Waters admitted that he slipped up when making the film, telling Uncut, “The one disappointment I had – and it’s my fault more than anybody else’s – is that it gave me a chance to introduce my sense of humour to the piece, and I signally failed to do that. It’s extremely dour.”
And for anyone who’s ever seen the film, that’s fairly accurate. Although the different shots are iconic from the film, like Pink sitting lonely in his hotel room or the pure evil behind the dictator scenes, it’s rarely a movie that you put on to make you feel better, especially when the animations look like something out of the more hellish scenes in Disney’s Fantasia.
Still, does that make The Wall a bad film? Not necessarily. It might be hard to stomach a lot of the disgusting scenes, and it could have probably benefited from a little bit of whimsy here and there, but if there were jokes thrown into the mix when talking about the struggles of someone trapped inside their mind, it might have lost its Floydian edge.
