ARTICLES & REVIEWS

1.Why did you decide to re-release Stone Monkey at this particular time?
It just felt the right time to celebrate that era again and Johnny’s contributions to it. It’s twenty years since the first ascent of Indian Face. Also the dvd format with the different chapters suited the story and the archive material, and this complemented Stone Monkey. I didn’t want to re-release just the main programme, its much stronger and more valid and representative of that period I think with The Story of Indian Face in it as well.

2. How do you feel about the legacy of the film? Did you have any inkling at the time that it might turn out to be so influential in the way rock climbing was subsequently portrayed by filmmakers?
I’m not sure what its legacy is really, but I’m obviously very pleased that people still enjoy it so much. I was in Yosemite two years ago and met some eastern European climbers who were climbing and filming on El Cap and who raved about it. They introduced me to the Huber brothers afterwards and Thomas Huber then also raved about it. It was such an ego boost for me, it made my holiday, more so than the climbing! - and that incident I think tipped me to do something and re-release it.

3. What impact did its success on your own life and career?
SM was originally a 10 minute commission. After it’s broadcast on Channel4, I started getting commissions from s4c, the first was for a series of 10 programmes. I also did an extreme kayaking film here in Wales that went down well, winning prizes at international film festivals, like SM had done before it. I also did a programme in Buoux with Jerry Moffat and Ben Moon on the first 8c climbing there. These probably would not have happened without the initial success of SM on channel four although at the time I was useless at selling ideas. Remember this was in the late eighties, well before ‘extreme’ became a brand. I was just mad keen to show the world what was going on in the outdoor world and blundered on. Luckily for me there were some producers in Wales that liked the adventure stuff. ( But I do remember trying to sell Buoux to an HTV sports programme and they refused to have it because “ there was too much climbing in it…” )

4.Has anything else you've made been broadcast on TV as much as Stone Monkey?
SM was repeated twice, the first time on boxing day that same year, it got a viewing figure of over 1 million, pretty good for ch4 in 1987. Many of the programmes I’ve made recently have been repeated more times. Waterfall Kayak was shown on Sky tv and repeated many times. ( Pepsi and others producers came to Wales to shoot their own versions on the same bits of water ). The most repeated has been ‘From Nowhere to the Middle of Nowhere’ 1999, a paragliding adventure with John Silvester in the Himalaya, it was re-cut in tabloid fashion for National Geographic’s A1 adventure channel and renamed ‘Crashing in the Himalayas’. It has been seen umpteen times by many millions of viewers worldwide (and John and myself have seen very little money from it.)

5. How much do you consider yourself specifically to be a rock climber these days?
I’ll always be a rock climber first but I’ve had long gaps away from climbing, particularly to go sea kayaking, at first in the eighties and also now with my girlfriend Justine who is a sea paddler and filmmaker. I always come back to climbing and I still climb a lot, but sometimes I suspect that now I do it just to prove that I still can. Pushing E3 right now.

6. Did you know about Johnny before you met him? How did you meet up; were you just walking past the crag or something and thought - he's special?
I was aware of the ‘Quarryman’, I remember going up there just after Johnny had done it and looking over at the quickdraws thinking how amazing it looked and fully realising how special it was. But I’d never met him. I had seen his pictures in the climbing magazines. I then bumped into him at Pete’s and suggested filming, he sneered a response, “yeah, I’m talking to some London people about possibilities” - in such a way that I thought, yeah you can fuck off too you precocious little bastard.

I then met him under Brant Direct in the Llanberis Pass, I was with Al George, and he turned up wearing only shorts, shoes and a chalkbag, he was super charming and friendly and in a few minutes he had Al’s harness on, our ropes, and gear on, and Al belaying him on an attempt to make a direct finish to Cockblock up the right arête of Brant Direct. He failed spectacularly, but I’d never been so impressed by any climber, his movements were so dynamic and what was more, he was a showman – on each placement he’d clip a krab direct on the wire, hit it hard with his knuckle to spin the thing furiously, and then clip the rope in just in time as the krab settled to a halt, gate facing out. I thought this guy’s a gift to any budding filmmaker. I pressed on with my proposal. In time the ‘London people’ didn’t work out and we started working on what became Stone Monkey.

7. What were the highs and lows of working with such a precocious talent?
We worked together well and never argued. He had great ideas, some of them too much for me, for example, he wanted the last hand hold on the top of the Quarryman to be a corner of a tv set, which would then come loose as he pulled on it and fall down the groove smashing to bits. I favoured a more steady approach, I was fairly sure of the structure of the programme and I wanted to finish in Wales with the ‘Quarryman Groove’. We went to all the locations that Johnny suggested in Derbyshire and worked out exactly what we thought would work. I filmed all the angles. Johnny scripted the original ideas. I got the commission, a part not to be underestimated, and produced and edited the programme. On most of the 5 day shoot we had a professional crew, it had to be like that in those days, they refused to let me be on camera because I was not in the union. We also had a director who ‘translated’ what I said to him to the crew. When these two ‘proper’ camermen came to Wales and saw Twll Mawr in all its glory, to be told that one camera location was on the ledge at the top of the groove they just said “no, we are not doing it”. We lost that day but fortunately they did not charge us so we had another chance. I phoned a company in Manchester, Vector TV and they arranged to send down a young lad with all the kit. Between us all, the lad, Johnny, Paul Pritchard & Bob Drury we hauled everything into place, I had my chance to be a ‘proper’ cameraman and Johnny did the groove three times resting inbetween takes as we changed camera angles. We were all mad keen, nothing was too much effort. So to answer the question, it was all a high at the time, and most of the time Johnny was on best behaviour.

8. What do you think of the film now?
I still enjoy the movements in it, and I respect more and more Johnny’s inputs especially the little touches. e.g. he disappeared at lunchtime when we were doing the dyno sequence at the old Plas Y Brenin wall, just as we were getting very worried where he’d gone he reappeared with two round bits of sheepskin from Anna Davies welsh wool shop at Betws y Coed – to go on his shoes to match his hat on the dreamy dynos. He had to get it just right and it worked.

9. There were rumours of a series of films for Channel 4 to follow Stone Monkey's success - what happened there?
After such a success we did expect another commission and we did put some ideas in. But commissions are always so very hard to get and soon after Stone Monkey was aired the commissioning editor Adrian Metcalf left to be replaced by an American who said to me, ‘ I don’t like climbing’, and that was that.

10. The documentary telling the story of the ascent of The Indian Face bundled with the DVD is excellent; climbers are really enjoying it. How did making of that film differ from Stone Monkey?
I had a piece of climbing history on hi8 tape, so all I had to do was tell the whole story as best I could, or rather get the main characters to tell it. I’m fascinated with the events surrounding the climb, for me it represents all that’s good and all that’s bad in climbing. Some people seem a little ashamed of what went on but this represents what happens at the top end of climbing all the time, and it is as good a story as any I think. It was a climbing event that will never be forgotten, it is now part of climbing folklore, and I had it on tape. I managed to get Johnny one evening to agree to do what became his interview, this was the hardest part of the whole thing, to get him in the right place at the right time and in a reasonable mood. He wasn’t in the best of moods and the outtakes became his ‘rants’. Joe Brown, John Redhead and Nick Dixon readily agreed to the other interviews, which were shot locally. Jim Perrin kindly agreed to narrate it. Then Justine worked on the structure and edited it. So it was all pulled together fairly painlessly at home with a very low budget.

11. S4C seem to have been an important outlet for your work. How important do you think this important regional broadcaster has been in promoting adventure sport films?
You sell ideas for tv programmes to commissioners, so what you get is whatever they happen to like. I was lucky that a producer in Caernarfon supplying S4C with mostly light entertainment and sports programmes was also very keen on adventure programmes. He let me work some kayaking ideas into programmes to begin with. This association grew and soon I was supplying him and S4C with ‘first ascent news’ items from the climbing world, eg ‘Liquid Amber’, (Jerry Moffat on his first 8c in the UK ), and ‘Hubble’, ( Ben Moon on his first 8c+ in the UK ), to go on an S4C sports programmes called ‘Sgorio’. The adventure slot then seemed to look after itself and I got more commissions. S4C was happy with their newfound expertise and I was glad to supply. This association has continued for twenty years, and is still going on. Some of these programmes have done well internationally, winning awards and being sold to foreign networks so I guess all this promotes adventure sports films.

12. How do you see the status of adventure sport films within the general broadcasting world? What might improve their ‘visibility’? Are international Mountain Film festivals such as Banff, Trento and Kendal important in promoting such films, or just a nice social occasion?
Adventure films always have been and always will be on the fringes of mainstream entertainment with some films breaking through occasionally. That’s it, there’s not much you can do about it, our sport will always be bizzare to the general public and misunderstood by producers. That used to annoy me, it doesn’t now. At the festivals, I am always entertained by the talks, they remain with me, and I think that’s the value of the tribal gatherings. As for getting adventure films into general broadcasting, it is difficult to get a film that satisfies and inspires the expert and also appeals to and inspires a general audience. You need to frighten, but it has to be fun. That balance is the key I think. I’m not much of a film buff, and there is a lot of absolute mind bending crap out there. But I think its important to have the festivals, the top handful of films are always inspiring for some reason or other, either by being very personal in their appeal, in their content or their technique, I remember seeing ‘Vision Man’ a few years ago and being moved by all three factors. But if there is not much going out at the top end as it were maybe the value of the festivals is in getting stuff in at the bottom end. In LLAMFF this year the best new filmmaker award went to Paul Higginson who made a lovely 7 minute film on ‘the different uses for old slate blocks’. There are a lot of people walking the streets talking about good ideas but not many are following through and actually producing a finished programme.

15. What do you think makes a good climbing film? Which other people’s work you particularly admire or find inspirational?
Johnny Dawes makes a good climbing film, but only in front of the camera.

16. You’re also particularly well known for your filming work in the worlds of kayaking and parapenting. Have you made many other climbing films apart from Stone Monkey and Total Control that we should know about? Are you planning to re-release any more of your back catalogue on DVD?
I’ve made lots of climbing and adventure films for television here in Wales, but these are not particularly suited for selling on dvd to climbers, there not ‘culty’ enough, as SM and Total Control perhaps. But i will be rereleasing on dvd ‘ From Nowhere to the Middle of Nowhere’ from 1999, hopefully with new material from John Silvesters’ recent trips to Rakaposhi, and i’ll recut ‘Buoux’ the late eighties programme with Ben Moon, Jerry Moffat and Johnny. Also I’ll also put ‘Gogarth’ and ‘Strone Ulladale’ on one dvd, - next year.

17. How did working with the late, great Jimmy Jewel differ from working with Johnny?
Jimmy was great to work with. Like most of the top people I’ve filmed with in dangerous situations, e.g. John Silvester, and Shaun Baker ( in Waterfall Kayak ), they would set the parameters of what they were prepared to do which somehow released me from ‘worry’. When we started filming Total Control, Jimmy simply said, “when I’m climbing don’t make any contact, don’t shout or say anything till I’m on the top”. He would then repeat the routes many times for me to film with our one camera, from different angles. The one route he did just the once was T.Rex, so this was shot in one, ‘the ten minute shot’. He soloed Left Wall 6 times in succession the morning we filmed it. I knew he was soloing close to the limit of his ability and I did have nightmares of him falling. If I didn’t have a camera with me I couldn’t just watch him solo, like once when I saw him on Cloggy soloing the Axe, followed by The Boldest.

It was more noisy working with Johnny.

18. Given your breadth of interests, do you actually get to do much climbing these days?
Yes, did ‘Too Hard for Jim Perrin’ in the Pass the other night, brilliant moves !

19. In the documentary bundled with the new DVD, Romancing the Stone, you recount an anecdote in which you mention other watersport films you showed to a snoozing Channel 4 commissioning editor before he picked ‘The Leaping Boy’. What happened to them? Are they still as fondly remembered by kayakers?
Yes, at the time plastic kayaks were just coming in then so kayakers were looking at some bigger drops. The very first video I ever did was ‘Affinity with Water’, it chronicled these times in the early eighties, with Ray Rowe and Franco Ferrero. Malcolm Griffiths then went on to apply some serious street fighting techniques to the new sport of waterfall kayaking, by wrapping a karrimat round his waist to lessen the rib crushing impacts. The culmination of all this was ‘Waterfall Kayak’, 12 minutes, which was the first film I sold to National Geographic, it won several awards at international film festivals, and it was sold to many international tv broadcasters. It was extreme before extreme was part of broadcast terminology and it launched Shaun Bakers career in television.

20. In view of the great reception the film has garnered again second-time round – any plans to team up with Johnny and make Stone Monkey 2? (Or is making one film with Johnny enough?!)
I tried hard to get Johnny interested in another film. For years. We had some good ideas but nothing happened.

21. What are you working on at the moment?
I’m still producing programmes foe S4C. I have done several adventure travel series’ for S4C recently, and also started producing nature programmes involving an element of adventure to get closer to the nature.
At the moment I’m working on a wildlife crime series called ‘Illegal Nature’ which will go out on S4C in the autumn.