Making the Echo Wall film

Now we’ve finished our wee film about Echo Wall and it’s about to be released, we’re starting to step back and finally come out of the bubble of working pretty much night and day on it. It was a very steep learning curve for us, or rather a series of vertical learning curves at each stage.

Although this is the story of one big climb, we’ve tried to pack the film full of as much climbing footage as we can. So there is plenty of bouldering, sport climbing, trad and winter routes, which were all part of the preparation for climbing Echo Wall in one way or another. Our aim was to make a pretty full climbing DVD with quite a lot of different types of climbing going on.

We also wanted to make a really honest film. It would have been pretty easy to for us to really play on the fact that Dave might have died trying to climb Echo Wall. And it’s true, he might have. I didn’t really see it at the time because he was slapping through the moves so quickly, but when you see him doing the final crux you can see his arms wobble. To someone not used to seeing hard climbing that might look like nothing, but Dave never does that. If he wobbles it means he’s about to fall off. Thank god he didn’t. But although for that moment at the crux of the route he was near his limit, he’s not a crazy risk taker. In fact the story of the film is of Dave first really battling with himself to decide if the risk really was the right thing to do, and then doing everything he could to climb the route really well.

There’s no wild falls or shaking or scrabbling for holds, because on Echo Wall it can’t be like that. As Dave said, falling off Echo Wall would be a once in a lifetime experience. All there is, is someone making the best performance of their life, in a very amazing place, captured on film. Everyone thats seen it so far has also said how lovely the landscape around Ben Nevis is. That was something we realised more and more as we were shooting it and tried to develop it as much as we could. Our favourite part of the film for this is the part of Dave running over Tower Ridge and Carn Mor Dearg. He was so tired after shooting all that having to run back and forth all day to collect the camera.

A huge difficulty for us was the combination of making the film on one camera, the desperate nature of getting any conditions just to get days climbing on Echo Wall itself, and the fact that there are no good bits on the whole route apart from the easy bit at the end. We wanted to go back and get more shots of Dave dropping the ropes near the top and soloing the rest of it but the route was wet every day since he did it (and now it’s already covered in snow! 

It’s really lucky Dave decided to do it on the day he did back in July, otherwise we would still be here making this film next July. What a thought.

Here is a wee clip from our interview with the legendary ice climber Jimmy Marshall from the DVD extras.