About three-quarters of the way through Sinéad O’Shea’s new documentary, Blue Road, about the writer Edna O’Brien, the camera lingers on a well-thumbed Marcel Proust biography with a Harrods receipt as a bookmark.
We see many other things in the London apartment where this footage is recorded – cake tins, Christmas cards, a walking frame, handbags, an orchid, a portrait of Samuel Beckett, miscellaneous clutter – but that biography and its bookmark might just be the perfect encapsulation of the lady of letters and glamour upon whom the documentary is based.
Edna O’Brien was born in 1931 in Tuamgraney, Co Clare. She died in 2024, aged 93, and was buried just a few short kilometres from her birthplace. In between, she lived what O’Shea calls “one of the great lives of the 20th century”. Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story attempts to capture the fullness of this life.
O’Shea began interviewing O’Brien for the documentary in August 2023. She recorded her final interview in April 2024, just three months before O’Brien’s death. The film interweaves these interviews with archive footage, diary entries (voiced by Jessie Buckley), reflections from figures upon whom O’Brien made an impression (Anne Enright, Gabriel Byrne, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Louise Kennedy, Walter Mosley), contributions from O’Brien’s sons (poet, Carlo Gébler, and architect, Sasha Gébler), and more, to paint a faithful and nuanced portrait of a woman who, throughout her career, was not always considered in good faith.
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“An old classmate of mine, when I said I was going to make a documentary about Edna O’Brien, said: ‘I was told that Edna didn’t write her own books,’” O’Shea says, as an example of this mauvaise foi. In the documentary, the source of such rumours – the “Machiavellian puppet master” behind the vitriol – is revealed to be O’Brien’s ex-husband, writer Ernest Gébler, who emerges as a kind of cartoon villain. The film’s title, Blue Road, derives from a moment in which he discovers a short story O’Brien has drafted and savagely criticises her description of “a country road, tarred very blue”.
“He gets very disgruntled and says there’s no such thing as a blue road,” says O’Shea. “And I guess it reflects this huge clash of sensibilities between them. He sees himself as a realist. But I think what it really suggests is his fear of her. […] He’s very distrustful of this ability she has to be, I suppose, more emotional, more subjective, in her writing. He sees that as a threat.
“So, I think Blue Road is a title which reflects her sensibility, rather than his. Because in the war between them, she was the unequivocal victor.”
One of the central accomplishments of Blue Road is the access O’Shea secures. And it was owing to a serendipitous encounter that she came into contact with her literary hero.
A former journalist (of this parish, as well as for the likes of Al Jazeera, the Guardian and other outlets), O’Shea had directed acclaimed documentaries such as A Mother Brings Her Son to Be Shot (2017), which told of a family’s reckoning with a paramilitary justice system in the Creggan estate in Derry, and Pray for Our Sinners (2022), which told of individual resistance to Catholic Church abuses, and was set in her hometown of Navan. Around the time the latter premiered, she attended the wedding of fellow film-makers, John Carney (Sing Street, Once). Knowing next to no one, she found herself deep in conversation with a woman about “bad men and broken hearts”.
I think Edna’s terrible flaw was her fluctuating faith in herself. Maybe it’s not fair to call that a flaw, but it’s certainly a dominant characteristic.
— Sinéad O’Shea
“I quoted Edna O’Brien to her, and she said, ‘Oh, you should make a film about Edna O’Brien. She’s one of my best friends.’”
The woman in question turned out to be Barbara Broccoli, producer of the James Bond franchise. And she really was best friends with O’Brien.
O’Shea, meanwhile, had interviewed O’Brien for an American magazine 10 years previously – an experience that made a “huge impression” on her.
“I found her exceptionally compelling and charismatic. And I thought, if you could just sit Edna O’Brien down with a camera, that alone would be the makings of a great film, because she was so singular, so theatrical; she had led this extraordinary life.”
Soon after the wedding, O’Shea contacted the groom, asking to be put in touch with her new acquaintance. Carney obliged.
“I had to send Barbara my film about Navan, which seemed like such a clash of civilisations,” O’Shea laughs. But Broccoli liked it, and set the wheels in motion that would lead to Blue Road.
“Within weeks, I got to interview Edna,” O’Shea says. “That was August 2023, and it was this amazing interview. It’s kind of the centrepiece for the film.”
In this centrepiece, O’Brien appears perfectly coiffed and maquillaged, wearing a sparkly black cardigan and delivering nuggets of wisdom that will turn out to be some of her last ever recorded. O’Shea recalls that towards the end of the interview, she became weak and had to finish up. Afterwards, she went to hospital for months.
“I was at this impasse then, because we had this wonderful interview, and I knew it could be a good film – I had development money from Screen Ireland, who were really enthusiastic – but I had nothing else,” says O’Shea. “And I knew that Edna had cancer, and they had decided to stop treating it. So, it was a very precarious situation. But curiously, Edna herself became this great galvanising force.”
During that interview, O’Shea had shown O’Brien archive footage in which a BBC film crew visits O’Brien and her parents at the family home in Clare.
“It’s like this really sick tableau of Irish sensibility,” O’Shea explains. “The mother’s lying through her teeth, saying, ‘I don’t mind any of Edna’s books.’ And the dad’s being jovial […] even though he was this terrifying alcoholic. And Edna’s sitting there perched in the corner, completely tense.”
To any Irish person, this footage (which features in Blue Road) plays like a farce. O’Brien’s father sings Danny Boy as the BBC cameras hungrily record. Watching years later, O’Brien was struck by it.
“When she went to hospital, she wrote me an email the next day, and she said: please make sure to use that piece of archive,” O’Shea says. “And so, I think maybe in that moment, I convinced her that this was a worthwhile project. And then she couldn’t be stopped.”
With the help of Broccoli, O’Brien began sending voice notes to O’Shea. She had ideas for titles (which “weren’t great”). She also suggested people to interview, and people whom O’Shea should “definitely not interview”.
Indeed, it’s no secret that O’Brien has long been a divisive figure in the literary scene. Many of her contemporaries treated her with contempt. The midlands writer John Broderick agreed with Ernest Gébler’s assessment that her “talent resided in [her] knickers”. The journalist Kevin Myers hypothesised that he “could willingly stick a hatchet in her head only to be applauded by a nation”. Blue Road highlights some of this criticism – it shows column inches and TV sketches devoted to her ridicule. Does O’Shea have ideas as to why such nastiness abounded?
“I think there is a distrust of female success here. I think traditionally, women who have prevailed here, they have a powerful male relative, or they are entirely above reproach – they’re kind of saint-like.”
O’Brien, meanwhile, was someone for whom “there was no explanation”.
“How did this girl from Clare flourish to this extent? What was going on? [The criticism] was jealousy a lot of the time,” O’Shea says.
“She doesn’t always help herself. She does say, I think, outlandish things. She would acknowledge [this] herself. But it’s just so amazing when you see how she was treated compared to her male peers.”
And while many of us may think of O’Brien as a steely and formidable figure, she was not impervious to the judgment of others.
“I think Edna’s terrible flaw was her fluctuating faith in herself,” O’Shea says. “Maybe it’s not fair to call that a flaw, but it’s certainly a dominant characteristic. She could be so queenly and dominating, but then totally wounded by criticism, which affected her for years afterwards.”
O’Shea recalls the last time she saw O’Brien, three months before she died.
“She was still recounting various pieces of criticism she received. I know it’s easier said than done, and God knows I’m oversensitive, but I really wish she had been able to push that criticism away more decisively. But that is the price you pay, I think. If you’re a sensitive person who wants to write, you’re going to be affected by everything around you. And she was very sensitive to everything.”
O’Brien’s weakness for bad men – “she kept falling in love with these awful men who cared nothing much for her and treated her terribly” – or in her love for the high life, might also be interpreted as flaws which stymied O’Brien.
Everyone from Marlon Brando and Jackie Onassis, to Paul McCartney found themselves in O’Brien’s orbit. O’Shea remarks that if there were some kind of artificial intelligence transcribing her diaries, it would unquestionably flag “champagne” as a key word.
“I was such a Puritan that I was a bit horrified,” laughs O’Shea. “She’s so endlessly generous to the point where she’s bankrupting herself, but it’s to create this atmosphere of glamour and excitement. I suppose it is partly a response to the poverty and precarity of her childhood. I do understand that. But it just feels a real problem for her, and it probably cost her in reputational terms. On the other hand, look at her life. […] For all my judgment, would I refuse to have a drink with these people? I don’t know.
“Maybe I would. I’m quite joyless.”
People talk a lot of rubbish about what it takes to be an artist. It takes tenacity. And she had that
— Sinéad O'Shea
But what sustained everything – a point that Blue Road attempts to emphasise – was the writing. Over the course of her life, O’Brien published 34 books of fiction, non-fiction, film scripts and plays. Even during an 11-year hiatus from publishing, she filled diary after diary.
At the time O’Shea interviewed her, she was trying to finish a book about TS Eliot. “My work has been my life,” she tells us early in the film (in a clip playfully juxtaposed after a montage of glamorous social events with copious champagne, and a voiceover recalling encounters with Shirley MacLaine, Marianne Faithfull, Roger Vadim, Jane Fonda).
For O’Shea, O’Brien’s earlier work is stronger than the novels of a more political focus that marked the end of her career.
“As good as those books are, I think she possibly should have continued her focus on her own life and the complexities of being a woman,” she says. “But having said that, I think it’s still an extraordinary achievement to reach the 1990s and to have decided on a whole new type of writing, and to succeed so well at that. Very few writers are able to achieve that kind of pivot.
O’Shea describes her as “enterprising” and “resourceful”.
“People talk a lot of rubbish about what it takes to be an artist. It takes tenacity. And she had that.”
Blue Road, which releases across Irish cinemas from January 31st, premiered at Toronto International Film Festival and won Best New Irish Feature at Cork International Film Festival. Produced by SOS in co-production with Tara Films, it received backing from Screen Ireland, Sky and the UK Global Screen Fund. But O’Shea expresses dissatisfaction with the fact that RTÉ failed to support a film that captures a central figure of the Irish literary canon, at a pivotal moment.
“We went to RTÉ as soon as Screen Ireland committed so we were looking for a much smaller investment than is typical, but they said no. It’s a real pity because she is such an important figure in Irish life, and we had this time with Edna in her final days and, of course, her diaries.”
One of the most unlikely, yet powerful, aspects of the film is the fact that O’Brien passed away as it was being made. O’Shea recalls the moment she learned of her death.
Late one evening, as she was working on an edit of the film, Barbara Broccoli called.
“I was like, ‘Why is she phoning me [at this time]?’ And, yeah. She told me that she died. I didn’t expect it, actually. She had been sick, she was very weak, and she was unconscious, I knew that. But I just thought she might rally again.”
Waves of emotion pass across O’Shea’s face as she says this.
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“It’s kind of deluded, but I did think she’d live, not forever, but much longer.”
Another part of her wondered what would happen with the film.
O’Brien already knew it had been accepted into Toronto.
“I’m not sure how much she would have understood, exactly, but I think it must have been reassuring for her,” says O’Shea.
The funeral took place in the idyllic setting of Holy Island, Co Clare, an uncommon celebrity cohort landing on the west of Ireland outpost for the occasion. It was clear the film had its ending.
“She would have loved the whole lot,” O’Shea says. “She would have loved the premiere of the film – it had a big premiere in the US as well. And it’s done well so far. People really liked it in Cork. So, she would have loved it all and felt so vindicated by it all.
“When I look back now, [I wonder] should I have been more reassuring? Should I have said, ‘This is going to be an unequivocal success?’ But I didn’t know.”
Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is in cinemas from January 31st
