Kathryn Ferguson, director of the documentary Nothing Compares, on getting to know the singer
Director Kathryn Ferguson attends a special screening of the documentary Nothing Compares in London on October 3rd, 2022. Photograph: Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures UKThe 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.
My father had been an avid fan of Sinéad’s 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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