Sinéad O’Shea on Her Recent Doc With Jessie Buckley, Exploring the 0.01% in ‘All About the Money’ and the Weight of Responsibility

‘All About the Money’ director Sinéad O’Shea Courtesy of Heta Heikkala

The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX) put the spotlight on Irish documentary director Sinéad O’Shea and her latest doc, All About the Money, which world premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, on Wednesday morning.

She was the featured speaker on the day’s “A Morning With” event at the industry conference of the 23rd edition of the festival in a session hosted by veteran documentary programmer Thom Powers of TUFF and Pure Nonfiction.

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All About the Money follows the journey of “activist” and “Communist revolutionary” James Cox Chambers, who goes by Fergie Chambers, the great-grandson of James M. Cox, the ex-governor of Ohio and Democratic presidential nominee in 1920. The member of the 0.01% serves as a lens for a broader exploration of money, power and revolution. Other parts of the story are Chambers’ Palestine and anti-Israel activism, which have drawn criticism, and the political comeback of Donald Trump.

O’Shea has taken on topics that cause debate in her work. A Mother Brings Her Son to Be Shot focused on a woman in Northern Ireland bringing her son to a punishment shooting by a paramilitary group. Pray for Our Sinners addressed the power of the Catholic Church, including brutality against children and women. And Irish writer Edna O’Brien‘s recounting of her controversial life was the topic of Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story.

O’Shea shared how working on A Mother Brings for five years took a lot of effort to overcome financing challenges, but she still decided to keep making docs. Her plan was to make a film about “the dying art of female ejaculation in Rwanda,” she told the Copenhagen crowd. But with half the film shot and funding challenges, again, the COVID pandemic put an end to opportunities to travel to Rwanda. So, she had to leave that doc behind.

Instead, O’Shea turned her attention to a mother-and-baby home and its leader in her hometown of Navan, Ireland for Pray for Our Sinners. Via firsthand testimonies, the doc dives into “the plight of unmarried mothers, the horrors of mother and baby homes and the prevalence of violence against children in Catholic schools,” as a synopsis notes. But a handful of people chose to resist the power of the church. The director emphasized on Wednesday that what she wanted to showcase in the doc was “how successfully they instilled in the women a sense of shame.”

After working on her first two features for years each, The Edna O’Brien Story and All About the Money came out in fairly quick succession, O’Shea highlighted. Irish writer O’Brien “had one of the great lives of the 20th century,” the director suggested. “And it touched upon so many things. She had liaisons with Marlon Brando and Robert Mitchum, and she wrote some of the greatest books in Irish literature. She made a fortune and lost a fortune.”

O’Shea enjoyed the support and love surrounding the O’Brien film. “I had lots of funding for my Edna project and lots of interest, and I was working with Gabriel Byrne [who is interviewed in the film] and Jesse Buckley [who narrates O’Brien diary entries and inner thoughts in the doc], who has just won an Oscar.”

The discussion then turned to her latest doc, All About the Money, for which she didn’t immediately have funding lined up. In fact, O’Shea shared that in doc making, it can at times also mean that it is all about the money. “You have to constantly break things down in treatments and synopses,” she highlighted, concluding that she wished she could simply state a more basic truth when pitching docs: “I just find [the topic] interesting.”

Asked about Chambers, she lauded him for his straight-shooting. “People rarely say everything they’re thinking, and he really did so many times, and he cared not for what other people thought,” O’Shea highlighted.

“The film reads the viewer a lot of the time,” the director argued in the context of discussing the doc’s audience reception. It can not only be viewed as a deep dive into wealth and power and what they do to people, but also “a study on trauma,” as people have suggested, she shared. Meanwhile, one critical film director at Sundance argued the film was “an attack on Zionism,” she added.

Asked about her approach to doc-making, O’Shea shared that, “I cannot stand documentaries which are gotchas, catching people out, laughinhg and being snide.” And she emphasized about her positioning in her docs: “I dot think there’s a responsibility for filmmakers to acknowledge their presence in documentaries” instead of “this joke, this charade of vérité.” She concluded: “Documentaries need to be concerned with the truth. Otherwise, they are fiction.”

When Chambers urged O’Shea not to screen All About the Money and offered her money because “he really, really hated it,” she asked for Powers’ advice, who put her in touch with Cover-Up and Citizenfour director Laura Poitras and Alex Gibney (Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, Citizen K), who offered that she should want a lawsuit. “I really don’t,” she said in describing her reaction.

What’s next for O’Shea? “I think I won’t make an observational-style film again for a while, because they are very difficult,” she said. “It is just so draining.” The filmmaker also addressed “the huge responsibility” of docs, highlighting: “You have to really look after the people in a film when you do that.”

She shared that she has written a script, which has received production funding in Ireland, without sharing more details. But she highlighted that if she does get to do that “in the next year or twp,” the appeal is to possibly work with actors, meaning “people who really want to be there,” in contrast to doc work.

“I am only filming people that I am personally very drawn to,” O’Shea concluded about docs. “But they are not naturally exhibitionistic. They don’t have a strong urge to immortalize themselves on camera, which is why they are so compelling. So, I just feel so much responsibility, always, to them. So, I’d quite like the novelty of working with people who want to be there.”

O’Shea wrapped up by sharing this insight into making docs: focus on the first interview. “An interesting thing is that first interview with a person generally does tend to be the richest. Everything is always there,” she explained. “People don’t like repeating themselves on camera, so they will say everything, they will give their best take at the start so much of the time.”