IT started with an overheard conversation in a Goodramgate bar.

International documentary filmmaker Kim Hopkins was seated at the next-door table to Helen Heraty and John Edwards in Koko International, glass of wine in hand.

“My ears pricked up, as directors’ do!” recalls Kim, as she heard of Helen and John’s ambitious plans for Grays Court in Chapter House Street, home to Royalty and senior clergy for 900 years and now in the hands of an ordinary couple for the first time.

An ordinary couple who had met through The Times small ads column and had eight children between them.

“We got talking and Helen said, ‘Do you want to look round?’, and I wouldn’t normally do that, but the wine was working, and so I was shown this amazing pile”.

Kim had previously made films in the Middle East, Africa, India and Eastern Europe and a documentary on modern slavery for a Norwegian television company.

By comparison, Helen and John’s project to turn the oldest inhabited house in England into an hotel with lavender-biscuit afternoon tea, weddings, art exhibitions and memorable bedrooms represented a very English story with very English disputes.

Initially Helen said ‘No’ to being the subject of a documentary, but after reflecting on the Oscar Wilde publicity principle, said ‘Yes’.

“I said it would have to be a warts-and-all documentary where the hotel plans could go wrong, and if I was going to commit to it, so did Helen – and I have to say she never had any problems with that and was very honourable,” says Kim.

The bank loan was in place…and then the credit crunch bit hard, once filming was already under way. “We filmed them the day Lehman’s went down, and everything changed that day,” recalls Kim.

Over the next five years to April last year, she followed Helen and John as the “dream turned into a living nightmare, fuelled by a battle royal with the next-door neighbours”, the National Trust’s Treasurer’s House.

Helen and her six children had been living outside York off the A59 out, mortgage paid, with a good income from holiday-letting her outbuildings; architect John had his own practice in Northumberland and did work for English Heritage too.

“If you break it down, what Helen knew about was looking after people, letting rooms, and John knew about heritage buildings so Grays Court seemed the ideal property rather than a hare-brained project,” says Kim.

“But as the hotel project developed, I kept asking why are you doing this when you were both independently comfortable and then you pushed too far and the tide went out?

“The film chose its own title at the very start, when John said ‘separately we would never have done it, but as the two of us together it’s folie a deux.”

This translates as the Madness Made of Two, although Helen is the principal player. “She’s an amazing character for a documentary, not only in terms of drama, but also because documentaries have had a habit of creating empathetic characters, but when I go out with my friends, most of them have good and bad in them and that’s what makes them interesting – and that’s the case with Helen.

“Frankly, one day I would leave Grays Court thinking ‘I have total admiration for her’, and then another day I would think, ‘that was quite despicable behaviour’, so I had mixed feelings, but overall I think Helen is a really good person at heart, never judgemental; she’ll take anyone in. But then she’ll deal with conflict quite badly sometimes.”

The female documentary maker in Kim realised that Helen Heraty was an ideal subject. “On screen, she looks good; she’s very complex and she’s tenacious as well. Women often get judged badly in films, where they’re two dimensional, because most films are directed by men and written by men,” she says.

“They’re either Mother Theresa or a whore and there’s not a lot in between, which I found interesting because people are used to seeing women put in a certain light, but as soon as they start behaving like a man, making all the decisions, being prepared to be tough and to battle, audiences think, ‘Oh, she’s not at all female’, and that’s why Helen has divided audiences at screenings so far. She’s opening up the debate about how women are presented in film.”

The film is complete, the festival screenings and Sunday’s York premieres in place, but Helen Heraty and Grays Court’s story is to be continued, the ending yet to be resolved.

Folie a Deux – Madness Made Of Two (15) will be shown at City Screen, York, on Sunday at 3pm and Monday at 6.30pm. Helen Heraty will attend question-and-answer sessions after both screenings. Box office: 0871 902 5726.