She doesn't want to talk about her famous siblings. But family is central to Sophie Fiennes's new documentary. She tells Geoffrey MacNab what drew her to a preacher man in LA

The Independent (online)
16 August 2002
By Geoffrey MacNab

Imagine a cross between Richard Pryor and the kind of revivalist preacher found in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, and you'll come close to the essence of the Reverend Noel Jones, the extraordinarily charismatic figure at the heart of Sophie Fiennes's new documentary, Hoover Street Revival, a hit at last week's Locarno Festival and now on its way to Edinburgh. Jones's sermons combine humour, metaphysics, acute social observation and practical advice on how to survive in one of the toughest ghettos in Los Angeles. He is revered by his congregation. "I thought I would never become a church-going person until I heard him speak... the man is dynamite," says a street kid who claims that his life was turned around by Jones (the brother of the singer and one-time Bond star, Grace Jones). "He makes you feel the spirit!" enthuses another churchgoer, who reveals that her husband is currently behind bars, "doing 25 years to life".

Ask what drew the filmmaker – sister of the actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes and daughter of the novelist Jennifer Lash – to South Central in the first place, and she grins. Five years ago, she explains, she was in LA. One Sunday, more out of curiosity than anything else, she visited the Greater Bethany Community Church. She knew that she would hear "great gospel music". What took her by surprise was the sermon that Jones delivered. "I was astonished by it – the charisma of the preacher and the whole event of church," Fiennes enthuses. "I was amazed by how sophisticated that sermon was... he had me glued to my seat, even as everyone around me stamped their feet up and down the aisles."

By chance, Jones then came to Brixton to preach. Fiennes lives just up the road, and approached him after the service. He was amazed to find a white woman in south London who had been to his church in LA. She, for her part, was equally startled by his claim that Grace Jones was his sister. "I thought it was a lame joke," she remembers. "My expression was obviously very quizzical, but he said, no, it's true."

It seems a natural link, but ask Fiennes about her own illustrious brothers and sister (sister Martha directed Eugene Onegin) and she's instantly more guarded. "It's frustrating that people have to perceive my work through the frame of what my siblings do. It's ultimately not that relevant," she says. "I don't want people to see my work in the context of my brothers' celebrity. People seem to need to see it that way, but I gently request that it's seen for itself."

She points out that she's been involved in filmmaking for as long as anyone else in her family. Back in 1987, when she was 19, she worked as a location manager on Peter Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers. She reminds me, too, that she has directed several documentaries, including one about her friend Michael Clark, the Scottish dancer ("one of the most vulnerable and repressed people I know"), whom she helped tend when he was recovering from his heroin addiction.

My question about family is still nagging her, though, and she suddenly brings up her (late) mother. Lash, she says, was an inspiration to her, albeit a sometimes daunting one. "She was very preoccupied with her own creative process. It took me some time to find a way to make work myself that wasn't dominated by the kind of angst that she seemed to be engaged with... in a sense, that put me off for a while. It [creating] just seemed like such a trial, such an ordeal, such a nightmare for her. She was always saying, quoting Munch, that art grows out of grief and joy – but mainly grief."

As it happens, there's plenty of the latter in Hoover Street Revival. The film contrasts the ebullient and celebratory church services over which Jones presides with vιritι-style footage of the day-to-day existences of his congregation in South Central. At times, these lives seem very grim indeed. We see a woman with HIV kicking in a cop's car window and then being driven away with her ankles shackled together; we see a man so depressed and ashamed about his life that he confides that "he don't feel worthy to read the Bible no more". An elderly matriarch asks forlornly "why the blacks got a curse on them? That's one answer I want to know." A homeless woman shows the contents of her bag – her most prized possessions are her Dove deodorant and her Bible ("I can't lose with the stuff I use," she quips).

Fiennes's camera picks up surprisingly intimate moments – a child dressing, kids playing on roller-skates. In one devastating sequence, we even see a mother at the moment that she learns that she has lost her son. No one seems to notice that they are being filmed. "Shooting on a DV, operating the camera, doing the sound myself, and being the only person there, I could become invisible more easily," Fiennes explains. "And because I was doing it myself, I could take more risks." She eschews voice-over narration, and doesn't appear, Broomfield-like, on camera herself. "I was trying to use the grammar of cinema," she says.

Between scenes of the church and of street life, Fiennes throws in aerial shots in which the camera looks down on the city below. "It's a very childish idea, and that is that it's God's point of view. But some of the other material is so raw and intense that you need to be able to get away – to have some distance."

Working with Jones himself obviously made a big impression on her. And part of her attraction to him, she suggests, was that the "combination of a spiritual inquiry and a psychological inquiry" evident in his sermons reminded her of her mother's approach to art and storytelling. "I was excited by what he was doing because I had a certain way of responding to it," she says.

This is not your typically "intimate" portrait, however. We're given little real sense of Jones's life or personality away from the church. Even now, Fiennes sounds awestruck about her subject and admits that she deliberately kept a distance from him. "I wanted to preserve the congregation's point of view and ensure that he had some iconic status. He exposes more of himself on the pulpit than off it."

Noel Jones and Fiennes are planning a preview of Hoover Street Revival at Magic Johnson Theatres in Crenshaw, LA, for the huge church congregation. Meanwhile, Grace Jones will hopefully be putting in an appearance during the Edinburgh screenings. "A friend of mine happened to bump into her [Jones] three days before the first-ever preview and told her about it and so she came. She says she loves it!" says Fiennes. The festival slot is vindication for a movie that took years to make and that – at least initially – no financiers would go near. "The whole thing was shot with borrowed money and credit cards... it was a white-knuckle ride!"