She can't avoid being mentioned as Ralph's sibling, but that doesn't mean Sophie Fiennes isn't an artist in her own right. She tells Donald Clarke about her new documentary.
Interviewing Sophie Fiennes is a tricky business. Ask her about her famous brothers - the actors Ralph and Joseph, if you haven't quite woken up yet - and you feel like a bit of a heel. After all, the 36-year-old already has a real career behind her: she worked in the art department on Peter Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover; she helped produce shows for the dancer Michael Clark and made a film about him for the BBC; and now she has directed Hoover Street Revival, a hugely enjoyable documentary about the Los Angeles ministry of the Reverend Noel Jones, who, with amusing synchronicity, turns out to be the brother of Grace.
"It's hard," she says. "Because I've made a film in my own right and it's not even about me. It's as much about me as it's about Grace Jones. It's so funny and so crazy. It's not anything to do with the film itself. There's always that frustration that if I was the audience for my film, I wouldn't want to go and see it if I knew it was by Ralph Fiennes's sister. Is that really a selling point?"
On the other hand, if you don't speak about the famous family you feel as if you're ignoring an elephant in the room. Every question seems to be conspicuously, clumsily not about the pulchritudinous siblings. "Actually, I don't mind talking about my family to Irish papers," she says breezily, letting me off the hook. "I like talking to Irish papers about it, because I have that link." Sophie's parents - the photographer Mark Fiennes and the novelist Jennifer Lash - moved to west Cork in 1972 and then on to Kilkenny. So from the ages of four and a half to nine Fiennes grew up in apparent rural bliss - "Picking daffodils for Mrs O'Donovan and getting paid £5 for 25 bunches" - with her five brothers and sisters.
"I had a total Irish accent," she says. "I learnt Irish. I learnt Irish dancing, and when people don't believe me I will get up and dance a reel. I have a very funny picture of me at a céilí. When I go back to west Cork I realise that all these memories are held in the roads. I suddenly remember all these things. They're held in the geography."
If she will excuse me for saying so, Fiennes indeed looks like somebody who might have grown up in the west Cork of the 1970s. Elegantly dishevelled and wrapped in a diaphanous scarf, she appears not to have quite shaken the hippy ambience that hung around that time and place. And the thespian attachments reveal themselves too. Several times during our conversation in a London cafe she breaks into broad, noisy impersonations, and curious heads turn in our direction.
I take it that, with all those artistic connections, she was always going to end up working in a cultural discipline. "Yes, but I'm sure that families whose parents are big in baking or banking or whatever have that instilled in them as well. I had a very eccentric upbringing. I went to 11 schools. I think that, for myself, what was happening at home was more consistent than school. School was just this thing that society required so my parents didn't go to prison. My mother would have been quite happy if we never went to school at all."
She speaks of her life in Ireland with the sort of wistful longing that could power a best-selling memoir: Cider With Sophie, perhaps. In those mellifluous Fiennes timbres, she tells me how her mother, who died in 1992, used to take her on long walks and read from The Rattle Bag, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes's anthology of poetry. She talks about watching cows being milked and of feeling at one with the "expansiveness of the landscape". And she talks of the seeds of the interest that developed into Hoover Street Revival. "I wrote this article for a French magazine explaining why I wanted to make this film," she says. "And I was remembering the first contact I had with anything vaguely like gospel music. When we were in the west of Ireland, about 1972 or so, we went to the local church. And there was this American couple who took pity on us because we were so bereft of popular culture. They gave us a copy of Jesus Christ Superstar. Of course it wasn't at all like black music. But maybe it was the start."
A quarter of a century later she was driving through Los Angeles with a friend and came across a gospel station on the radio. Invigorated by the fiery preaching, she and her companion decided to investigate the city's black churches. Initially their interest was in the music, but when she saw Noel Jones in Greater Bethany Community Church, in South Central Los Angeles, she was taken aback by the subtlety of his rhetoric.
"We expected the sermons to be all hell and brimstone and guilt-tripping. But they were quite psychological, quite cognitive. They were both sophisticated and immediate. And he was personally engaging. I remember writing this letter back to a friend, saying we went to this amazing church and the pastor was like a cross between Marvin Gaye and Socrates."
Jones indeed has a singular style. Twisting his huge arms with serpentine guile, he teases out strangely precise theological and philosophical questions. An electrifying rock-gospel accompaniment simmers around him, often exploding back into action with unexpected spontaneity.
Fiennes takes a hands-off approach. There is no voice-over, Jones is seen only once away from his pulpit and the vignettes of life among the drive-by shootings, heroin addiction and social exclusion of South Central are presented baldly, with no attempt to impose a context. But considering the intimate access the film-maker negotiated, it is clear she established a great deal of trust with Jones and the area's inhabitants. "He was really cool. The fact that he even let me in showed how open he was," she says.
Having attended the church in LA - which Jones is renaming the City of Refuge - she later tracked the preacher down when he was visiting Brixton, in South London. Amazed that she was familiar with his ministry, he invited her back for a cup of coffee. "We chatted and I got a sense of how laid-back he was. And then he said that his sister was Grace Jones. People often say she's so out there, they must be so different. But he's very radical within the church. So he's just as far out as she is."
Hoover Street Revival works wonderfully as a bracing, invigorating performance piece. But some Christians may be concerned that, as with the fad for the sacred music of Arvo Pärt or the saxophonist Jan Garbarek's noodlings with the Hilliard Ensemble, the picture might be stripping a religious experience of its meaning for the superficial entertainment of a secular audience.
"You've touched on the most painful aspect of it for me. That's why it's important that I'm the producer as well. I have to be in control of what happens to it out there. But I was always very honest with the people there. I would explain that I was trying to convey the experience of their church for secular people, and they'd say, oh, you're moving in the glory! They were so sweet. Somebody even came up and anointed me with their holy oil."
Although Fiennes admits to no conventional religious beliefs, she confesses that while filming a baptism she felt something that corresponded to descriptions she had read of the experience of receiving the Holy Ghost. "It was like an electrical current," she says. "Like a sense of something taking over your body. I nearly dropped the camera. I don't know how cold and rational I really am. I'm trying to open up the secular audience to something quite touching and thrilling - what someone called the snap, crackle and pop of the supernatural."
Made for about €500,000, which is a few old jam jars and a couple of bottle tops by Hollywood standards, the film is, unusually for a documentary, receiving a theatrical release. And, considering that the director raised the initial finance by maxing out her credit cards, this is no mean achievement. Next time she's interviewed she may avoid being asked about the famous family. But, sadly, not quite yet.
"I was at the Hay-on-Wye festival with Joe the other week," she says. "We were queuing up for our tickets and I suddenly realised that everybody was looking at him: What's he eating? Who's that girl with him? I felt really sorry for him. We ended up in the celebrity enclosure. And then you're in this different world with the winners and the achievers. And I just wanted to be a punter."
Apologising for returning to the subject of the relatives, I wave her off home to Stockwell and stroll down Pall Mall, musing on whether it may ever be possible to forget you're a celebrity's sister. Outside the Theatre Royal Haymarket, where the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Ibsen's Brand is running, I spot a poster of Ralph Fiennes the size of the Saddam Hussein murals that used to litter Iraq. So, no, I guess she's stuck with him.
Hoover Street Revival opens at the Irish Film Centre, Dublin, on Friday