Roger Waters has opened up on the emotional footage about his late father that appears in his The Wall concert movie.
The former Pink Floyd man’s Roger Waters The Wall hits cinemas this week. It‘s based around scenes shot on his three-year world tour and accompanied by road-trip footage showing his first visit to the Italian beach where his father died during World War II.
Waters tells Rolling Stone: “I’ve never tried to visit, because my father’s body was never found. I never really knew the circumstances of his death in any detail.
“We’d been in southern Italy, filming in the memorial garden at Cassino — a lot of people gathered, including a news crew. A British expat named Harry Shindler, living in Italy, saw it on his TV. He went, ’I might be able to help that person.’
”He traces people from the war who are missing, and tries to fill in the gaps. He called me and I went, ’Well, that’s nice.’ Bugger me – he found the spot where he was actually killed.
”The bit in the film that is just me looking at the sea, that is actually Anzio Beach. It was very moving to be there, but the whole trip was very moving.”
The film also shows Waters reading the military letter informing his mother of her husband’s death. ”I’d only ever looked at that letter once before in my life, about 10 years ago, and I put it where I never looked at it again,” he says.
”I gave it to director Sean Evans and said, ‘I will look at it somewhere over there.’ That’s where we did it. And I’ve never looked at it again.”
Waters, who left Floyd in 1985, also talks about the band’s latest album The Endless River. Asked if he liked it, he says: “No, but so what. There’s an awful lot of records that I hear that I don’t like.”
Roger Waters: The Wall debuted in cinemas this week.
