The first thing that struck on meeting Sinéad O’Connor in 2012 was her height. From the years of watching her on MTV I had always presumed she was tall and willowy; but she was small and slight. She was also incredibly softly spoken.
The previous year while studying for a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art, I had made a short film called Máthair, and there was nobody’s music I wanted more for the soundtrack than Sinéad’s. I reached out to her then manager Fachtna Ó Ceallaigh and was delighted when I was given permission to use it. I sent over the final film as a courtesy and didn’t hear anything back. I was stunned when a year later they got in touch to ask me to direct a music video for her track 4th and Vine.
My father had been an avid fan of Sinéad in the late 1980s and The Lion and the Cobra became the soundtrack to my childhood, as he played it on repeat as he drove us around Belfast. I rediscovered her in the 1990s, when she became an icon for me and my teenage friends as we loved her music, her look – everything about her.
Her savage takedown by the media a couple of years later – after her tearing up of the Pope’s photograph – left an emotional dent. When I started to make films 15 years later her story was the one I wanted to tell most of all.
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For the music video of 4th and Vine, I went to Sinéad’s house in Bray, and spent a few days working with her and John Reynolds. Meeting her in person reminded me of all the potent feelings I had as a teenager about her. This is when I decided to embark on the 10-year journey it took to complete a documentary about Sinéad, Nothing Compares.
I know now that Sinéad was somewhat shy. I had seen her perform, witnessed her incredible voice and her boldness, but I got to see another side to her. I feel extremely privileged to have helped share part of her story. I am very grateful that we had her blessing to make our film, that it came out when it did, and that Sinéad got to see the reaction to it and feel the love it generated.
When the film was released in the US last year, the most poignant moment for me was receiving a photo of a giant billboard of our poster in the middle of Times Square. It dawned on me that surely one of the last times her image would have been shown in Times Square was in October 1992, when crowds were steamrolling over her records after the SNL incident. It felt quite profound to see this giant picture of her face, back where she belongs after 30 years.
Nothing Compares is on Sky Documentaries on Saturday, July 29th, at 9pm
