I spent a lot of time in hospital, and in bed I had nothing much to do except draw and read, and drawing became my way of expressing myself, getting my thoughts and fears down on paper. And I suppose that's what I'm still doing: drawing things that I fear, someone asked me the other day if I thought all the drugs I had to take as a child had an effect on me.

Gerald Scarfe

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I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

Gerald Scarfe

artist past thinking

And having suffered for part of the war when I was a child. I was too young to really understand what was going on but one of my favorite pieces of animation now is that Goodbye Blue Sky in The Wall because that deals directly with that period in time.

Gerald Scarfe

wall goodbye children

How do I feel about war? Well anybody I guess, I hope, I don't like it.

Gerald Scarfe

wells feels war

Well I was an asthmatic child. So that for most of my childhood I was in bed. Bedridden.

Gerald Scarfe

childhood fatherhood children

Where as in animation you have to kind of do a series of drawings in between to complete the movement.

Gerald Scarfe

drawing movement kind

I have been to several wars to draw. I went to Vietnam. And made drawings in Vietnam during that period of the war there, and found that to be a very very sad situation.

Gerald Scarfe

vietnam drawing war

I haven't done a book for about 3 or 4 years now.

Gerald Scarfe

done book years

So war is an extremely sad business, because the majority of people don't want to be in it.

Gerald Scarfe

want war people

So the whole of war, when you look at it is probably run by professional soldiers, and the rest of them are just recruits, or people who are just forced to join the army.

Gerald Scarfe

army running war

I do have a weird vision of the world, ever since I started I was told, 'You're Hieronymus Bosch, your drawings are grotesque.' But of course, they don't seem like that to me.

Gerald Scarfe

top-news

All the children had to wear a gas mask in case of a gas attack by the Germans. They tried to make the masks like Mickey Mouse faces so the children would like them. But I didn't. They had big ears on them.

Gerald Scarfe

wear big mask children

I just recently did a film with Disney, and they put the drawings straight on the computer. And it's all painted on the computer now and not by hand anymore.

Gerald Scarfe

hand just now film

And then I think they asked me to work on Wish You Were Here, which was the next album coming up. And I didn't do anything for a long time. I had other projects, and I didn't get around to doing anything for a bit.

Gerald Scarfe

me you work time

And um, when I came back to England I put a very complex soundtrack on it, featuring everyone from Jimi Hendrix, right through to Neil Diamond, you know, everybody that was kind of popular who was kind of popular at that time.

Gerald Scarfe

back know you time

And when Roger talks about the frightened ones running away from the bombs, I immediately thought of my days when I was young and I had to wear these gas masks.

Gerald Scarfe

days wear thought young

England was incredibly dull and everything exciting seemed to be in America.

Gerald Scarfe

everything england exciting america

I mean when I was working shall we say with Disney, you know they sent me the script for the film Hercules and I had to imagine what all the characters looked like. And to develop those characters, so nothing exists visually when I get the script.

Gerald Scarfe

nothing know me you

So, I created these creatures called The Frightened Ones which in the film you see do have mask like kind of heads and they run beneath the ground to hide. Which is what in fact we did during the war.

Gerald Scarfe

hide see you war

You know it's my job to visualize, what is literal or audible, so I designed all the characters, and I designed what they do and how they should do it and so on.

Gerald Scarfe

how job know you