Filmed over 11 years and edited down from over 300 hours of footage, the documentary Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami was certainly an undertaking. But was it worth it? Director Sophie Fiennes and producer Katie Holly think so. They joined Seán Rocks on Arena to talk about the project and their experience with Grace Jones.

Fiennes recounted her first time meeting Jones, at a screening of a documentary she had made about Jones' brother, a Pentecostal preacher. Jones approached Fiennes after watching the film, praising her work.

"I love the smell of your film."

Fiennes thinks it was about 18 months later that she received a call from Jones. Jones told her she had been getting a lot of requests to make a documentary but didn't want to do something standard. She wanted to work with Fiennes. Fiennes thinks it succeeds in standing out from the typical documentary format.

"Everything is present tense. It's not reflecting….It's not people talking, talking heads…the idea is you're really with her in the film…As a viewer, you have an intimate access to her for two hours."

Seán selected an audio clip from the documentary in which Jones talks about channelling some aspects of her step-Grandfather, who she calls "Mas P".  Jones felt her experiences with him inform her stage presence and influenced her stage persona.

"I had so much rage…Even on my stage act, believe it or not, I was playing out Mas P. That's why I'm so scary…That's that male, dominant, scary person that I become…I'm playing Mas P. I became him."

Seán noted that Jones has a reputation for being a difficult person to work with. Is this reputation unfounded? Fiennes believes there are a lot of positives to the way Jones deals with things.

" There's something to learn from how she's ready to be…ugly when necessary and, you know, I've been asked a lot recently about Harvey Weinstein…It's a good thing for girls to not have to feel, women to not have to feel that they've always got to be passive and nice and, you know, polite. Grace's capacity to, as it were, be rude, is one of the great things about her."

Did Fiennes ever see Jones drop all the personas, Seán asked? After all, 11 years filming is a long time. Fiennes challenges the idea that that's even possible.

"I think we're all performing all the time…Life is a performance…We're all in different registers of performance and I think it's a sort of cultural construction to think that there's a person that's not performing. Different environments and different situations produce different performances out of us. Like, you're going to be different at home than you are at the workplace…I think it's a much broader bandwidth of being in the world than, you know, we're led to believe."

Fiennes believes this idea of challenging expected behaviour is the takeaway of the film.

"What the kind of takeaway is from Grace in this film is that…you can play… break open this narrow constraint of how we think, who we think we are and be more playful and more creative."

Listen back to the full interview with Sophie Fiennes and Katie Holly on Arena here.

Photo: Getty / Mark Metcalfe