Sinéad O’Shea told David Hennessy about her award-winning documentary Blue Road about the late Irish author Edna O’Brien.
The award-winning documentary Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, comes to the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith for a preview ahead of its UK release.
The film, written and directed by Sinead O’Shea, charts the fascinating life of one of Ireland’s greatest writers who died last year at the age of 93.
Winner of the Best New Irish Feature Award at the 69th Cork International Film Festival, in Blue Road O’Brien recounts her controversial life, novels, love affairs, and stardom through personal journals read by actress Jessie Buckley, with contributions from Gabriel Byrne, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Anne Enright and other luminaries, including her sons Carlo and Sasha Gebler.
O’Brien came to prominence as the author of the book Country Girls and the subsequent sequels The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss.
Published in the 1960s, these books shot her to fame but saw her banned in Ireland and even denounced from the pulpit for how they spoke in frank terms about women’s sexual and romantic desires and needs, as well as about female agency.
O’Brien made her home in London. Although her marriage to writer Ernest Gebler would not last, she would raise her two boys.
She was also famed for her parties that attracted famous names like Michael Caine, Robert Mitchum, Marianne Faithful and more.
We chatted to writer/ director Sinéad O’Shea ahead of this week’s ICC preview and UK release.
Sinéad became known for the feature documentaries A Mother Brings Her Son To Be Shot, about paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland, and Pray For Us Sinners (2023), an exploration of systemic abuse in her hometown of Navan.
Let’s go back to the very beginning of it. How did this project start?
“It was a really inauspicious beginning.
“About 10 years ago, I was asked to write about her for Publishers Weekly and I thought she could be really boring.
“I had this idea that she was quite a fluffy or frothy writer or something.
“Anyway then I read Country Girls and I just thought it was amazing.
“I thought she had really captured my adolescence which was in the 1990s.
“I just thought it was such a brilliant evocation of what it is to be an Irish girl.
“And it was so funny.
“And then I read her memoir, Country Girl and that is amazing.
“That is describing, I think, one of the great lives of the 20th century and it’s all so beautifully written.
“And then I met her and she was just charisma incarnate.
“She was really amazing and I was very dazzled.
“I literally quoted her for years afterwards.
“And then about two years ago now I was at a wedding and I quoted her to a guest at the wedding, and the guest said, ‘Oh, she’s one of my best friends. You should make a documentary about her.’
“And I was like, ‘Yeah, of course’.
“So I tried to get through to Edna for about a year and I didn’t get through to her basically.
“Her agents were saying ‘she’s busy’ or ‘she’s sick’.
“And then I went back to the wedding guest, who was the producer of the James Bond films at the time, Barbara Broccoli.
“She really was best friends with Edna so she asked Edna and Edna said yes but it was going to be, I think, just one interview.
“But then there was kind of a moment where I showed her this old archive of Edna’s family and Edna just really got very interested in the project after that.”
So it ended up being a series of interviews, did you actually become friends? How close did you get?
“I don’t think so, no but I think she told me a lot.
“I think she understood how interested I was, and then she shared her diaries with me.
“It was a very one way conversation.
“I just listened to her with great gratitude, but no, I don’t think we were friends.
“She was dying and she was very upset about dying.
“She did not want to die.”
You mentioned the diaries. I mean they must have been fascinating but I wondered about how the access to them came up..
“I know, it’s so mad. She didn’t know me.
“It’s just kind of one of the craziest things I ever heard of, just giving a stranger your diaries.
“But Edna was very smart and I think she just had a good sense that I was very obsessive.
“It was extremely trusting of her.
“I literally just got a voice memo from Barbara one day.
“Barbara was visiting her in hospital the whole time and she’d record these really long voice memos from Edna, and Edna’s ideas for the film would be in them.
“Some were hilarious and some were brilliant.
“And then one day one of the voicemail says, ‘Now, Sinéad has to go and read my diaries’.
“I mean there were just 1000s and 1000s of pages so the real problem with the diaries was transcribing them in time and working them into the film.”
Did you find you had so much stuff, so much material, it was a challenge to get it down to the 100 minutes, you know?
“Yeah. It’s funny you say 100 minutes.
“The whole aim was to be just below 100 minutes.
“It’s at 99.50 or something.
“But I kind of wonder now because a lot of people say to me, ‘I would have watched that for much longer’ but I just think when you’re going to the cinema you’re a bit put off if you see something’s like 120 minutes, especially for a documentary.
“So I just thought, ‘Right, I’ll just make it tight and really intense and then people will enjoy it’.
“But it really was hard to get it down.
“There was just so many things you could have gone into, you could have made a TV series out of it.”
You found her husband Ernest Gebler had also written in her diaries…
“Often in the third person.
“Then I was so confused.
“I was like, ‘Okay, surely someone this poisonous must be her vicious ex-husband’.
“But then it was in the third person so then I started to get really paranoid and I was just like, ‘What if Edna has created this as a kind of joke or something remembering how her husband used to speak to her or something like that’.
“But then I showed it to Carlo, as you see in the film, and he’s like, ‘Yes, that’s my father’s handwriting’.
“At the time I felt actually just mortified showing him.
“I thought it was going to really be upsetting for him but he’s so pragmatic.
“He was like, ‘Yes’.”
Carlo and his brother Sasha are very matter of fact about what was a very bitter family break up..
“They (Edna and Ernest) were chemically unsuited, just the way they (Carlo and Sasha) describe things.
“But then what is so beautiful about them and how they speak in the film, I think, is when you see the emotion coming up.
“It really makes an impact when it does because they really try to be matter of fact but they’re amazing people, both of them.
“I’m blessed that they were so collaborative.
“They really were.
“I was in Carlo’s attic continually because he had so many papers himself.”
After her marriage broke up and with such volatility, do you think she lost faith in men or love?
“No, no, no, no because she got obsessed with that British idiot politician.
“She lost her house, her beautiful Chelsea mansion.
“She devoted the whole of the 1980s to just waiting for him to call.
“So no, she wasn’t bitter enough if you ask me.”
You also asked her if she regretted anything and she said no..
“If you have regrets at that age, that’s a problem.
“I think for your own mental health you need to say ‘that was fine’.
“I do believe her.
“(But) it’s very complex.
“She did have an extraordinary life.
“I would say I felt in the last year she was so sick that I don’t think she felt fond enough of that life and actually, I think she should have been so proud of what she achieved: To come from nowhere, to be without any family money or to have no university education and to take over that world, that was amazing.
“I would have liked her to have felt more unequivocal pride and satisfaction, I suppose, in what she’d achieved.
“But I don’t think she had regrets exactly either.”
Her books were banned and she was denounced from the pulpit, she had her books were described as filth.
Although she is now considered one of ours and the world’s great writers, she wasn’t always appreciated as that..
“I think you’re totally right.
“There was a very fixed idea of what a writer was, and it was actually a very boozy kind of person.
“The parties shouldn’t have counted against her in the way that they did but they did because she wasn’t a man.
“There was a certain kind of man, still it’s a persona in Irish literature, who’s sort of pompous and pretentious and cavalier and a bit wild.
“And Edna was just a woman and that was not acceptable.”
She stayed strong in spite of all that though, didn’t she?
“I don’t know.
“I felt sometimes speaking to her that she was saying things to me and kind of second guessing herself and kind of correcting as she went along as if in response to criticisms that were about to come that had already been made if that makes sense.
“I feel like she was very affected by it and I feel she shouldn’t have been because she left all those people for dust.
“They were all sh*t compared to her.”
There is a lot of said about her parents. I made notes of her father and his drinking and being violent with it. For her mother I wrote a question mark, what sense did you get of her parents?
“Well I think the mother was very religious and I think she was very mired in the Ireland at the time which was kind of all about propping up these terrible men.
“And so their home was a prison, I think, in some ways but there was no escape from it.
“They were all just waiting for the dad to fall off the wagon again.
“I think she (her mother) was very ashamed of Edna’s writing.
“She was actually a very smart woman in some ways too but I think she and Edna had a difficult relationship.
“I would say the relationship between Edna and her father was even more difficult though.
“I think there was an awful lot of pain experienced by Edna because of that.”
You asked her about her trauma and if she got enough help with it. Her answer was a certain no..
“Yeah I think it just wasn’t even in the vocabulary.
“I don’t even think I would have framed a question like that until the last few years.
“There wasn’t really the vocabulary for talking about trauma or your family.
“There’s still a lot of taboos around that.
“I think she just was unable to fully express herself but also it would have fallen on deaf ears.
“I’m talking just particularly when it comes to her family, she was well able to express herself on many other things.”
I didn’t realise at all about her intended suicide and even going so far as to take some pills.
Was that something that was known about?
“It was in the memoir so I did know about it but I suppose it’s only when you investigate all the events that are happening around the time of the suicide (attempt) that you understand what the context is.
“So it’s like this disastrous love affair and selling the house and her new writing being really poorly received and feeling hopeless.
“In the diaries she’s only in her 40s but she’s saying she’s ‘coming towards the end of my life anyway’ is kind of her attitude, little did she know she was actually only halfway through her life.
“But she just felt completely hopeless in that period.”
At a time when she had given up Edna’s son Sasha slid something under the door speaking about tomorrow and she realised she did have something to live for.
“It was so beautiful when we watched that together.
“We watched it in a cinema and Sasha was there for that screening and at that point in the film, he just kind of exclaimed loud because I think it was amazing for him to see that unfold before his eyes.”
He would have had some awareness of the events..
“(But) to see it yourself is quite different.”
She speaks in the film about Ireland having a very strange attitude to sex which was dead right as well although no one else would say..
“I really love that line.
“I mean, she was just so clever.
“She just kind of couldn’t contain herself so she would just say these things that absolutely nobody else would say aloud and it was so electrifying, I think, for people.
“I always feel like half the world fell in love with her and became obsessed there and then the other half became obsessed too but in a way of really hoping to destroy her.”
It must have been very upsetting when, as we see in the film, you were interviewing her and she started to feel unwell and had to stop.
However, she still came back and resumed the interview some time later..
“Yeah, it was incredible.
“And that final interview she is so valiant and brave because she was so ill and weak and she is only three months from death.
“Physically she’s just so frail but the brain is still working and her voice is still working.
“She’s just like this creature in a Beckett play just insisting on these thoughts being shared and articulated.
“I find it really moving.”
You must have been very sad when you got the news last July that she had passed away..
“Yeah, I was really shocked.
“It sounds insane because she was 93, she had stomach cancer but I felt that she just had such a strong will.
“I just felt like she’d keep going.
“I really believed she would sort of rally again and keep going.
“I also really hoped she would see the film and rally again too.”
She never got to see the film but did you finish it for her after she passed?
“Yes and no.
“To be very honest I’ve made this film most of all for me because I was really interested.
“I was totally interested.
“It’s a way of telling my story.
“It’s a way of telling lots of other people’s stories.
“I just think she’s an amazing person.
“And I just felt completely compelled to tell that story.”
What did you make of the outpouring after she passed away in July last year?
She was very much loved but then when she had been condemned and denounced etc, was there a two faced ness to a bit of it?
“Yeah, I think there’s a kind of hypocrisy there about some people’s response to it.
“Because I think even when I was starting to make this film people were warning me not to and saying that she was problematic and that there was still this very insidious idea that had been planted by Ernest and then taken up by so many people that she was a bit of a fraud essentially.
“I know who those people were so I feel like there’s a kind of hypocrisy about how people celebrate things after someone’s safely gone.
“But also that’s life.”
What is your favourite Edna O’Brien book?
“My favourite is A Pagan Place which was published in 1970.
“It’s quite experimental by her standards and it wasn’t received that well at the time but I think it’s amazing.
“I think it expresses something about Ireland that is very hard to find elsewhere and it’s the purest distillation of Edna and her family and her memories and her life.
“It’s an amazing book.
“Country Girls is great as well.”
Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story previews at The Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith 7.30pm on Wednesday 16 April. The screening will be followed by a Q and A with Sinead O’Shea. For tickets and more information, go to irishculturalcentre.co.uk.
Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is in cinemas from Friday 18 April.
