Classic Couple Academy

In 1960, a young Irish woman named Edna O’Brien wrote a sexually frank debut novel, The Country Girls. She became a literary sensation, writing for The New Yorker, delivering provocative interviews, and authoring screenplays.

Her success enraged her writer husband and made her a pariah in her native Ireland, where her books were banned and burned. She would make her home in London, where she conducted numerous love affairs, hosted star-studded parties, and made and lost a fortune.

In July 2024, Edna passed away and this film provides a final testimony from her, aged 93, as she reflects upon her extraordinary life for filmmaker Sinéad O’Shea’s camera.

Granting the director access to her personal journals — read aloud in the film by the Oscar-nominated Irish actress Jessie Buckley — and with additional perspectives offered from Gabriel Byrne, Walter Mosley and an array of renowned writers, Edna does not shy from any subject. And O’Shea handles the portrayal of this complex woman and literary giant in the poignant documentary Blue Road – The Edna O’Brien Story.

Blue Road – The Edna O’Brien Story, as candid, dark, and enchanting as O’Brien’s wonderful novels, makes its world premiere at TIFF 2024 Sunday, September 8, 2024 at 6:45 PM at Scotiabank theatre as part of the Toronto International Film Festival.

Our Filmmaker 5 interview with Sinéad O’Shea about Blue Road – The Edna O’Brien Story follows

F1: Edna O’Brien has been described as both “the playgirl of the western world” and “the advance scout for the Irish imagination.” She was the subject of intense public scrutiny and recipient of the highest literary and arts accolades. How did you seek to address that dichotomy in this film? 

This is such a good question because that felt like the fundamental challenge for me. 

Edna had a very colorful life and she is also a great artist. A truthful documentary has to acknowledge both these sides of her but I had some initial concern that her personal life might distract from her literary achievements as so often happens with female artists. 

Edna was a totally imperfect person but the critiques of her have often been for the wrong reasons. The most ridiculous charges have been laid against her, and her male peers have always been subject to entirely different standards. 

I think Edna herself concedes that she gave too much of her time and self to insubstantial men and I felt like that was a big part of the story which had to be included. 

In the end, my strategy was to attend to both these sides of her and hope that an audience would appreciate both. It’s easy enough to tell a story about glamour and doomed love, but I also wanted readers to understand her intellectual abilities, the quality of her writing and its context, what a thing it was for to have created this work from such a difficult milieu. 

It should feel that for every party or bad romance, there is equal consideration to one masterpiece or another. 

F2: What was the process of determining what to include of Edna O’Brien’s personal journals in the film? Was anything off limits?

No, actually which I still can’t believe. In fact, she advised me to look in certain archives for the most personal sections. I deeply admire her for this. It showed such optimism, I think. 

Having said that, I censured myself and avoided certain kinds of material. The sexual content in the film is a little tame compared to some sections of the diaries but I thought some of it might be a distraction. Maybe I am too Irish and Catholic. 

F3: You include some extraordinary personal footage and intimate encounters from Edna’s life in the film. How did you come to this material and how did it shape your creative process?

Well, I first came to Edna through her books when I interviewed her ten years ago for Publishers Weekly. Her writing is so brilliant, and she is so beguiling and hilarious in person. When I first began to think properly about making a documentary about her, I did some light You-Tubing and immediately found a wonderful film called Mother Ireland which was originally broadcast in the mid-70s. It’s shot on film, she is looking beautiful, and being very funny and dramatic. 

She has an extraordinary quality for camera interviews; she is very formal and even theatrical but it never feels scripted or predictable. She keeps digressing, jumping off course, querying things. It’s so lovely and dynamic, and you see that same quality through all her interviews across the decades. Each of them is a total performance but is somehow spontaneous at the same time. 

We had a great archive producer, Paul Bell (Amy and Senna) who sourced some of that fantastic old BBC footage of Edna when she was starting out. Family members and friends came forward with some of those amazing photos. Edna’s son Carlo provided the photo album from her marriage which include her husband’s very strange and revealing captions. 

The very best piece of archive though in this film is actually a piece of work shot by Carlo when he was a teenager. He decided to film some of her 1972 novel Night and filmed Edna with her father on the farm in Drewsboro. It’s a beautifully made film, a real achievement for such a young person, but for us, it’s the most amazing artefact. Some of Night is very autobiographical and Carlo’s instinct to film certain sequences is amazing. 

We constantly return to his film throughout our film as it really helps tell the story of Edna’s inner life. 

F4: How did making this film alter your own perspective on what it is to be an Irish woman?

To be honest, it didn’t enormously shock me. In fact, reading Edna’s books was a great comfort to me when I finally came to them. I felt she was articulating everything I had experienced, even as a young girl in the 1990s. 

Edna saw that women and children were being hurt by our patriarchal Church and State. She understood how the poverty of the country made people feel so vulnerable that they could never assert themselves. 

There has been a lot of change in Ireland in recent years but I don’t think people fully understand how patriarchal the country has been. I don’t think Irish people themselves realise it. Women have constantly been encouraged to defer to men. It’s changing, and that’s not to say there haven’t been women who defied men, but the women who’ve had a say in our country have nearly always had powerful or rich male relatives. 

F5: Did Edna have an opportunity to see any of the film? If so, what was her reaction? If not, what might you imagine her reaction to be? 

No, there was no opportunity to share it with her; she had become so sick, and was very blind and deaf. 

We all feel so disappointed about this because the hope had been that she could bask a little in the aftermath of the film’s release. As I keep saying, she’s not perfect, she’s hard work, but she was very wronged at times, and I’d like her to have known that some of this was going to be acknowledged. She was so upset about certain disappointments in our final conversations. 

She was told that the film had been accepted into Toronto and I think that was a source of cheer, but she was very weak by then. 

I watched the film a few days ago with three of the women who had spent the most time with her in recent years and it was a very emotional screening. We all sobbed afterwards because as one of them said, that was “our Edna” they had just seen. We all knew what was meant. She is such a magnificently complex person.