Keeping up with the Joneses
Sophie Fiennes talks to about the challenges of bringing her Grace Jones documentary to life and why she’ll never be happy ‘‘just making content for service providers’’.
James Croot
Like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. That’s the task that faced Sophie Fiennes as she set out to make a documentary about the multi-talented, multihyphanate, seemingly multipersonalitied Grace Jones.
The 50-year-old film-maker sister of acclaimed actors Ralph and Joseph, Fiennes spent five years following the model, singer, actor, artiste and icon from Jamaica to Paris in order to make Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami, but says she never really wanted to try to distill Jones’ essence.
Speaking just after the documentary’s world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September, Fiennes says she was determined to make the movie her and Jones’ way.
‘‘It’s funny. Even when I was trying to raise the finance, people were saying to me, ‘what do you want to say about Grace Jones?’ and I’m like, ‘well, the material will say what it can say’. I certainly had no intentions of embarking with an idea and then carrying it out.’’
For Fiennes, the key and the excitement was being open to whatever happened.
‘‘Someone asked me, ‘when Grace is going crazy in that room in Japan, what are you thinking?’ And I said, ‘I’m thinking, have I got a good frame, should I move to a close-up? Is it in focus?’
‘‘Cinema is made of moments. All kinds of people have made careers out of how films should be constructed – plot-point turns, three-act dramas, but someone said to me very early on when I was making documentaries that ‘fiction is made of plots, life is made of stories’. So I believe that I’m really storytelling with all the moments that I gather.’’
A firm believer that the idea of concretely knowing who anyone is, ‘‘is a kind of falsity, a construction, a pretence’’, Fiennes says Jones is living proof that human beings are much more contradictory than fictional movies would lead us to believe. ‘‘They say, ‘well this is the character who does x, this is the character who does y’. But if you really look at people, there are infinite variabilities of who they might be.’’
That and her desire to ‘‘keep things in the present’’ was also the reason why Fiennes eschewed the usual documentary staple – the ‘‘talking head’’ – the expert, friend or acquaintance who can shed light on the subject matter. ‘‘Yeah, I deliberately didn’t want to have anyone else ‘commentating’. I thought you’d be interpreting it and it would take you out of the experiential immersion of it – force you to have a kind of distance.
‘‘It’s [talking heads] a formula that doesn’t really interest me as a filmmaker because it’s always about the past. ‘I remember when…’ always looks back on a moment that we, as
‘‘Even knowing Grace really well, I was like – ‘my god, it’s so disorientating the way she’s kind of like so many multiple personalities and yet always herself’.’’
viewers, can’t really be a part of. The orientation of this film was to give you as much intimacy with Grace as I could through this film-making form.’’
Fiennes, who first met Jones after she made a film about the disco queen’s brother’s church in 2001 (‘‘I love the smell of your film,’’ was her eclectic assessment, Fiennes recalls), says one of the things that has always been fascinating about her is ‘‘Grace’s trust in her instinct’’.
‘‘There’s nothing predictable about how she sees or responds to something creatively. I was trying to give her every chance to be involved in the lighting and set design of our concert sequences, but she didn’t even want to do a rehearsal. She wanted to kind of survive instinctively in the moment.’’
Fiennes describes those ‘‘sequences’’ as borne out of a desire to create something that was both a celebration of Jones’ love of theatricality and also ‘‘capturing a performance that couldn’t be seen outside of the film. I wanted to show the intimate relationship she creates with an audience.’’
She admits she eventually reached a point where the amount of footage felt unwieldy and she knew her love of editing would be seriously tested. But, it was only when Fiennes had to focus on raising the money that she decided she had enough.
‘‘Grace kept saying, ‘I’m not in any hurry to finish the film’, so I waited until I felt that I couldn’t make another film until I’d finished this.’’
The biggest surprise that came through in the edit? Jones’ accent, which ranged from New York to Parisienne, upper-class English to Jamaican.
‘‘Even knowing Grace really well, I was like – ‘my god, it’s so disorientating the way she’s kind of like so many multiple personalities and yet always herself’.
‘‘And I was surprised again when we did the Q&A after the premiere, that she sounded so foreign. I was thinking, ‘we’re in Toronto, which isn’t that far from Syracuse [Jones’ American base] – how come you’re speaking with a foreign accent?’ ‘That because I was in France last week,’ she explained.’’
Making the documentary also allowed Fiennes to discover the ‘‘facts’’ surrounding one of the great Grace Jones mysteries – what the lyrics of Pull Up to My Bumper really mean.
‘‘I met the writer of the song, a Jamaican lady named Dana Manno. I said to her, ‘wow, you wrote the lyrics, that’s amazing!’ And she said, ‘I know, I’d just come from Jamaica to New York and the traffic was just so busy. Every car would pull up to the other’s bumper’. She wrote it literally about the excitement of being in New York and living the city. It was Grace who saw the double entendre and pulled it out of it.’’
Quickly turning reflective, Fiennes mentions that nine people featured in the documentary have already died.
‘‘I guess that’s the other thing about making a documentation. It offers up a kind of immortality, while also confronting you with the truth of human life’s fragility.’’
And acutely aware that most documentaries are now viewed on smaller screens in people’s homes, she says her real wish for Bloodlight and Bami is that it brings people into cinemas, where possible, for a shared cinematic experience.
‘‘You’re never going to have the music played to the volume it should be if you’re not in a cinemas. For me, I’m making cinema for a collective to watch – as you would with a church service, a disco or a party – not content for service providers.’’
❚ Ahead of Grace Jones’ appearance at Auckland City Limits and concert in Queenstown, Auckland’s Capital Theatre is hosting two screenings of Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami on
February 14. For more info and tickets, see eventbrite.co.nz