Rich Heap Profile

When you made the video 'Hard Grit' were you into climbing bold style routes yourself or was this something that developed later?
Which do you find more nerve racking filming ascents of scary routes or climbing them yourself?
When I made 'Hard Grit' I wasn¹t into doing bold stuff really. Never have really.
Don¹t mind how spaced the gear is but as long as it¹s there. As soon as I know I can hit the ground I really have mind melt. The thing was at the time I was living with Neil Bentley and Seb Grieve, knew everyone in the scene and was often dragged out belying.
I eventually got round to taking a camera out with me. It was absolutely terrifying. Watching Seb do 'Parthian Shot' (one of the first things I witnessed) I could hear my heartbeat in my head, you really didn¹t know that flake was going to hold and knew there was a good chance that it was going to be tested. Though I've put the camera down I still got/get dragged out belaying and eventually bored enough to try nearby routes but the ones I've done ('Balance It Is', 'Cock Robin' and 'Groove Is In The Heart') I'd consider to be safe-ish.

Now that all of the awards and ceremony's have calmed down, how do you know view 'Hard Grit' as a video? Do you think its Slackjaw's best footage?
I still think 'Hard Grit' is a bloody good effort. When you make a film you really are putting your neck on the block and it is scary. Everyone is so movie literate and it is like art really in it's subjectivity. So to make something that has had the kind of impact 'Hard Grit' has had is fantastic really.
Nobody can appreciate how hard it is to make films, because every decision, no matter how small, seems important, will be judged. Slowly this builds to a ridiculous degree and feeds all your insecurities about the project. By the end you are a nervous wreck and begging for somebody to like your stuff. For me the best film I've been involved in is Salathe, just because it felt like a huge gamble. The environment and the possibility that we wouldn't have a story made the achievement all the more vital. It was a very rich experience and sharing it with only four other people made it very acute. The best footage is surely the stuff on the final morning bivvy. It says everything about why you'd choose to climb a big wall.

Having tried hard Gritstone routes like 'Ray's Roof', do you feel this prepared you for the crack pitches on the Salathe Wall, El Cap, when you climbed it with Neil Bentley recently? Did everything run smoothly when Neil and you were on this route?
Stuff like 'Ray's Roof' didn't help on Salathe at all. We made that mistake thinking being able to climb hard cracks was the key. That's how we trained and by the time we got on the 55m headwall of Salathe and found that what was needed was just fitness not masterful crack technique it was too late. If we went back we'd approach the route very differently.
Afterwards we swapped to trying to on-sight 'Freerider' and what helped was general body fitness because the hardest part was hauling the sack and then still being able to keep going for days.
On the route I'd say everything ran smoothly, we had a really good time. Principally this was because it was such a huge relief to get on the route. The pressure of making the film and getting fit was starting to take it's toll on both our mental and physical health and our relationships. We were getting cabin fever on the campsite and needed it to be over. Getting on the route was deliverance from a kind of purgatory; we were finally getting on with the business. It's amazing to think in the final film only ten to fifteen minutes are dedicated to the build-up and the rest to the ascent of the route because in reality the training (11 weeks)
and film prep (6 weeks) had taken all the majority of time. The ascent having only took five days.