BAFTA award for best director

A few weeks ago I mentioned that BAFTA Scotland had nominated me for best director in their new talent awards. On Friday Dave and I (and our families) were in Glasgow in a packed grand theatre for the BAFTA ceremony. I had totally convinced myself that much as it was absolutely amazing to have been nominated here, we could never win this award.

Well, it turned out I was wrong about that. The host opened the Best Director award envelope and read out that the winner was me. 

After lifting my jaw from the floor I headed for the stage wishing I had made a ‘just in case’ speech after all. Winslet would have been proud.

We heard that BAFTA’s jury had liked how personal Echo Wall was as well as the scenic beauty of the places we filmed. I am still feeling a touch bowled over by all this. But it’s brilliant for sure to get this recognition. 

This week Echo Wall also won best Scottish film at the Fort William Mountain Festival and best film at the Glasgow Mountain Film Festival.

A date at the Baftas

Next month I have to be in Glasgow for the Bafta new talent awards ceremony. Unbelievably, the reason is that I’ve been nominated for an award for best director for Echo Wall! I heard this news about a week ago (but was instructed to keep quiet until Bafta’s press launch today) and still trying to make sense of it.

It’s really great that Bafta liked Echo Wall enough to get a nomination at this level. It’s certainly a huge vote of confidence for the film and made me more excited to work on future film ideas.

I’ll post up some pics from the night when it comes around.

Awards for Echo Wall!

Wow, where to begin. What a weekend.

Our first film, Echo Wall, premiered at the Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival last night and I discovered a new-found respect for Dave for doing his lectures. I figured I would be nervous getting up to introduce the film but not that nervous! I can't believe Dave gets up on stage regularly and talks for an hour or so without notes. If any of you saw me just before the evening started with a crazed look on my face and you could see the whites of my eyes, it was because I was so flustered I managed to drop and lose my notes - thank you Pete for finding them! It was only a couple of paragraphs but I could just not remember them for love nor money. This was, by far, more nerve-wracking than watch Dave crank his way through the crux on Echo Wall. Kudos to Dave and any public-speakers out there.

To say I was blown away when it was announced later that we'd won the Alien Rock award for Best Climbing Film would be an understatement. But when Sir Chris Bonington presented the Tiso Best Film award to Echo Wall, well that was just unbelievable and I was left literally speechless, as anyone in the audience who seen me stare blankly at it in disbelief would probably agree. It's very hard to get your head round, especially when we were not expecting it; for heavens sake, I only turned a camera on for the first time last March! Needless to say, we're both dead chuffed and thanks to EMFF and everyone who came along to make an amazing evening.

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.

Echo Wall trailer live

We have the trailer for the Echo Wall film up on You Tube for you. Have a look! Dave is taking pre-orders from his shop now here.