Edna O’Brien documentary: 'She was so good at conveying what it was to be a woman'
Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is in Irish cinemas from Friday, January 31. Picture: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
In 1960, a young writer named Edna O’Brien published her debut novel, The Country Girls. Its storytelling quality and sexual openness made her a literary sensation - but in her native Ireland, her books were banned and she was denounced from the pulpit.
The author moved to London, where she had love affairs, grew further success as a writer and held star-studded parties attended by the likes of Marlon Brando and Robert Mitchum.
Filmmaker Sinéad O’Shea’s documentary Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, revisits O’Brien’s extraordinary life and features a final testimony from her before she passed away last summer at the age of 93.
The author also provided access to her personal diaries which are read by Killarney actress Jessie Buckley through the course of the film. Yet O’Brien was initially disinterested in participating in a film about her life, and it was a chance meeting with James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli that helped set the wheels in motion.
“She was quite sick at the time,” says O’Shea. “I think she was very busy right up until her death, she was trying to finish a book about TS Eliot - any spare time or energy was going there, so she didn't really see the point.”
At a subsequent wedding, the filmmaker struck up a conversation with another guest. “I quoted Edna O'Brien to them, and the guest had said: ‘Oh, she's one of my best friends, you should make a documentary about her’. So that was really how it started.”
Barbara Broccoli, one of cinema’s most successful producers, was later re-acquainted with O’Shea. After watching her previous documentary Pray For Our Sinners - which explores the stories of those who stood up to the Catholic Church - she advised her friend to take part.
The resulting film is a thorough, detailed and enlightening account of O’Brien’s life. As well as a huge amount of archive footage, Blue Road features personal accounts from the writer’s journals, and a moving final testimony as she reflects upon her life.
In their initial interview, O’Brien spent a lot of time talking about dreams. She was struggling with ill health but moved, O’Shea says, by some archive footage with her parents that she showed her. “She said: ‘Look at me. I look really sad, don't I?’ The next day, she went into hospital, but she emailed me from the hospital, and she said: ‘Will you be sure to use that archive?’ And from then on, her interest was really ignited.”
What was it about the author’s life and her writing that fired O’Shea’s imagination and made her want to tell her story? “I didn't really understand Edna's literary worth or status. I did English in college, and yet my sense of her was maybe she was a bit frothy. Her reputation was at a very low ebb, I think, for a long time.
“Then I interviewed her for Publishers Weekly, an American magazine, about 10 years ago, and it meant I got to read a lot of her books,” she says.
“I began with The Country Girls. It really spoke very directly to my experience of coming from the countryside and of being a girl in the 1990s,” she adds, realising that it struck a chord with her own experiences even three decades after it was written.
“It seems bizarre, but I do think Ireland was quite unchanged for a long time, until the late 1990s, so I really recognised this kind of smothering patriarchy and way of thinking about women in which none of their concerns are serious, but the concerns of men are always serious.
“I thought she was such a brilliant writer, and she was so good at conveying what it was to be a woman, and particularly an Irish woman. Then when I met her, she's so charismatic, as you've seen in the film. She’s so formidable, and endearing and funny and interesting. You're totally drawn in, completely enraptured. There's a combination of things.”
The film details how O’Brien’s writing initially made her a pariah in her homeland, her marriage to and subsequent divorce from an older writer, Ernest Gebler, her legendary London parties, and the growth of her success internationally.
Through these times, she continued to write prolifically with bestsellers which included Girl with Green Eyes, August Is a Wicked Month and A Pagan Place.
The documentary also explores her personal struggles, including when she began attending the psychiatrist RD Laing with whom she took LSD - an experience she later said marked her forever.
Actress Jessie Buckley gives the documentary an extra layer through her readings of extracts from O’Brien’s diaries. The Killarney star is a big fan of the author’s work and O’Shea was connected with her through their mutual friend, the poet Eva HD.
“I was trying to think of actors who could voice the diaries, and it really felt like Jesse could be the best person, because she's just so talented. She's made that move herself, you know, from rural Ireland to London, she's kind of conquered worlds, and yet she still retains this magic about her.
"I asked Eva if she would ask her, and I was obviously a bit nervous. But again, kind of instantly she said: ‘I'd love to do this. I love Edna. I love all her work’. And so it was actually very easy.”
As well as O’Brien's quick wit and candour while engaging with the project, O’Shea realised while making the film that age was taking its toll on her. “A lot of this was to do with the fact that she was so old and so sick and was deaf, so she really couldn't hear things, so conversation could be very stilted at times. She has such a great brain - I think she was thirsting for more stimulation.
“I think I probably had underestimated how upset she has been over the years by all the criticism she received at times, especially in Ireland. For some reason, I thought she might have laughed it off more readily but I was wrong in that,” adds the filmmaker.
“I do think she came to be very celebrated and recognised here for her work. But her initial reception in the US, for example - she’s immediately embraced by heavyweights such as John Updike, Philip Roth or JD Salinger, with whom she spends lots of time, and she's instantly respected, and she still is, in literary circles in New York. She's always considered to be a heavyweight, whereas here, she had to prove her worth in a way that her male peers never did.”
- Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is in cinemas from Friday, January 31
