Sophie Fiennes: On Grace Jones, Bloodlight and Bami, and documenting an icon

Sophie Fiennes was born to make films – quite literally. One of seven children, her brothers include Ralph, star of Schindler’s List and The English Patient, and Joseph, who shot to prominence with his leading role in Shakespeare In Love. Sophie’s sister Martha is also a film director, while another brother, Magnus, is a composer.

“My mother definitely had an agenda for us,” Fiennes remarks of her upbringing, during which she and her siblings were encouraged to be artistic. “We were some kind of creative experiment that she was involved in. So then you spend a lot of the rest of your life trying to extricate yourself from those kinds of debts and expectations.”

Fiennes seems to have struck the perfect balance, becoming an established filmmaker, while always upending expectation and convention in her work. She has collaborated with the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek on The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology; won critical acclaim with her portrait of German artist Anselm Keifer in Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow; and now has turned her attention to capturing the essence of a multi-faceted supertar and cultural icon Grace Jones. Her new documentary, Bloodlight And Bami, is a fascinating odyssey into the world of the celebrated singer and performer.

This project came about following Fiennes’ first feature documentary, Hoover Street Revival, about a Pentecostal church community in Los Angeles, and the sermons of its preacher, Bishop Noel Jones, brother of Grace Jones. It was this connection that caused the usually wary Jones to trust Fiennes implicitly, and despite having turned down many other pitches for documentaries before, the singer agreed to Fiennes’ idea of a more observational film.

“Having seen what I had made about her brother,” says Fiennes, “she thought that was more what she had in mind. It’s that idea of just being with people in the moment. It’s closer to cinema verite – I’ve turned it around and called it verite cinema. With cinema verite, it was about a tonality of being with the subject, whereas this is verite cinema. It was fantastic to have that opportunity to be with Grace and create a document of all these moments, and figure out how to structure this.”

Jones has become iconic not only due to her talent, but because she represents so many different things to different people. She’s a musician, model, muse, and a strong black woman. She’s also an androgynous beauty, a survivor, and a grandmother – so it would be understandable if Fiennes had been daunted by trying to encapsulate her in one film.

“I tried not to approach it thinking, ‘How should a film about Grace Jones be?’ in a kind of objective way,” Fiennes remarks. “I just tried to get into the vehicle, strap myself in and go for the ride! I gathered what I gathered and let the truth of being with Grace be the primary material.”

Fiennes was thus at the mercy of Jones’ whims and globe-trotting adventures, as the director followed the singer over the course of five years. The timing of the project felt important, as Jones was not only recording her album Hurricane, but also visiting her Jamaican home a lot.

“We didn’t want the film to be only about the album,” says Fiennes. “I decided to be very open and just gather footage – gather evidence. When you make an observational documentary, you’re completely at the mercy of life as it’s unfolding; you have control over nothing except your creative instinct. I had a bag packed and when she called, I’d just go – to Moscow, to the studio, to New York – as part of her entourage.

“She wanted to explore her relationship with Jamaica, and as there was a family gathering there, she brought me along. The film isn’t nostalgic, it’s not a bio-pic in the sense of telling the full story of her whole life in a piece-meal way. Grace’s past is always in her present anyway, but the Jamaican material takes us to her origins; the root and the soil which grew her, as much as the narrative of the childhood itself.”

Punctuating these observational chapters is footage from Grace Jones’ concert, filmed last year in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre – a place that Fiennes knew Jones would be appreciated.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in Ireland,” she notes. “I grew up in Ireland, and I’d even seen a few great concerts in the Olympia. I knew that the Dublin crowds would be wonderful. The stakes were high – most of our production budget went on those two days, and we were shooting on film – but the audience and the excitement they brought were perfect. Grace utterly loved the crowd, as I knew she would. After the first song, she came backstage to change hats and just declared ‘I LOVE this BEAUTIFUL city!’”

The stage is where Grace Jones really lets loose her theatrical imagination; it’s the place where the musical of her life is played out. The film includes unique performances of her iconic hits ‘Slave To The Rhythm’ and’ Pull Up To The Bumper’, as well as the more recent autobiographical tracks ’Williams’ Blood’, ‘This Is’ and ’Hurricane’. Fiennes viewed these numbers not just as stock concert footage, but a creative exploration of the singer’s identity now – both on and off stage.

“I definitely wanted to feature her performance,” explains the director. “I felt like I could explain who she was through her past and this cultural construction of looking back, but I wanted to have this present-tense quality, which is all unfolding scene by scene. And I’d seen how her performance has changed since she made A One Man Show in 1982, and I wanted to document how she performs now.

“We’ve all seen how the cultural construction of Grace Jones has changed, and is changing all the time. So by throwing this in, it’s like throwing another big curveball into that conversation. Every generation and demographic has a different fascination with her, so trying to speak to a cultural consensus of who she is is impossible. So the truth and excitement of just her, just filming her now, was fascinating.”

As these performances are intercut with Jones discussing her childhood, and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her grandmother’s second husband – known as ‘Mas P’ – we come to understand how raw and honest her songs really are – and how Jones’ resilience allows her to use that pain to fuel her work.

“She took that fear and moved it around 180 degrees and put it on the audience,” observes Fiennes. “She was able to internalise it, experience it, transform it and offload it. To me it’s a testament to creativity and how wonderfully rich and resilient we are as humans, to be able to do that. Even that famous moment of Russell Harty [where Grace hit him during an interview], there’s an element of that. When he patronised her, told her to be silent – he was occupying this area of authority, of domination, and she resisted in that moment. She was provoked in a way he couldn’t have predicted – even though he was incredibly rude and patronising.”

Fiennes’ choice not to use talking head interviews, or provide any explicit analysis, breaks with the tradition of music documentaries. Even in the past few years, documentaries about Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston and Lady Gaga have all tried to draw a through-line from the artists’ childhoods to their career highs and lows. In the case of Winehouse and Houston particularly, there was something uncomfortable about how writers and directors wanted to create simplistic victim narratives about women who were no longer alive to answer back.

“I haven’t seen the Lady Gaga one, but I did watch the documentaries about Amy and Whitney,” says Fiennes. “I think that what’s different about Grace in terms of Amy and Whitney is obviously that she is still alive, and indeed the intensity of her aliveness is what makes her such a strong presence. When she walks into a room, she is calibrated to a higher tension of being here, of being alive.

“There’s nothing docile about her. And I did think to myself that there’s almost a safety to women when they’re dead; you can excavate them when they’re dead, and draw conclusions. But Grace is still so alive, still the agent of her experience, she’s not a victim. And that’s scary for some people.”

Grace Jones: Bloodlight And Bami is in cinemas from October 27.