Does it help being the daughter of Jim Sheridan?

Yes, you know the film industry is renowned for being quite a close knit kinky kind of industry, and a lot of it is who you know and not what you know, that has been said in the past.  From my own personal view, if you know someone you can get your foot in the door a little easier, but you kind of have to keep your foot there yourself, because there is a lot of money on the line in movies, and just because you know someone, they won�t you stay, you know what I mean.

What influenced your subject in August Rush?  Was it something that was personal to yourself?

Actually, the producer a guy called Richard Lewis. The story stems from his own life, when his son was born nine years ago and he was being carried back to the producer and his wife, his hand came out of the baby blanket and started to move to the music that was playing in the birthing room and everyone joked and said look your son is a conductor. That kind of image kind of stuck with the producer and then when he saw my first feature film, it had a very similar image. When these two babies are born and they reach across the two cribs and join hands, he thought that those two images seem to match, so he sent me the script.

It was quite different from your previous film Disco Pigs, but they also approach love and fantasy in a similar way. Were you hoping to achieve a similar subject matter in this film?

I guess I am always attracted to stories that have two extremes. Disco Pigs has immediate violence and then this kind of romantic love and poetry I thought, so I guess August Rush is more the magic side of it.  I wanted to make sure it was grounded in some kind of emotional reality that an audience would be able to sympathise with, so I tried to do that as much as I could through the performances of the actors, that they would feel real and raw and earned, that you can�t earn that kind of magic in the real world it has to be earned.     

Did it take a lot of hard work to assemble the music?

My composer was Mark Manchina. I worked with Mark very closely. He had a huge amount of pre-production time and we had to pre-record all of the music, so we were really doing it backwards and starting from the music and going out from there.  It was good in one way because the creative origin stemmed from the music, and then everything after that came, which makes sense for a film like this. On the other hand it was a bit of a practical nightmare, because we have so much work to do in pre-production, and nothing to guide us except the story and the screenplay.

How does it feel to move from acting in films like �My Left Foot� to directing and screenwriting?

I definitely wouldn�t call what I have done in the past acting (she laughs), I just had some tiny parts as an extra and stuff like that. It wouldn�t have really been acting.  I guess I have been around sets since my dad made My Left Foot in 1989, so I guess I got into it at around that time, watching how he worked with actors and his kind of genuine approach to acting and to the story, so I guess I have been into it since then.

Are you hoping for an Oscar nomination for this film?

I suppose anyone who makes a film is hoping for an Oscar nomination, no matter what. But I don�t know if this particular film is an Oscar kind of movie. I would hope that we would get a song or music. That would be great to get a nomination for either of those two.

The film was based on the screenplay by Nick Carson and James Hart. Were there any challenges involved in making the play work on the big screen?

Yes, there are always challenges.  I fell in love with the script, so as my job as the director, the only pressure I feel really is to have something that reads fantastic on the page, and give it as much meaning on the screen, that is the only thing I am concerned about when I�m on set.  There are definitely challenges, you can�t specifically write music on the page, it�s something that you feel and you hear and is emotional, so that�s a challenge.

Did you have a clear idea of the actors you wanted to work with or was this decided in the auditions?

I did have a clear idea of what I wanted, but I did not have specific actors in mind, so I went and I met Freddie Highmore and it struck me that Freddie really has a quality that is innocent and kind of wide open, a clean slate, an honest point of view of the world. He also has a real fearlessness, so the combination of those different sides to him I thought was exactly what I needed for August.  Then Johnny Rhys Meyers kind of went for the material on a very instinctual level. He responded to the story of August in a kind of very raw way, so that made perfect sense.  I was looking for someone who had the grace and poise of someone like Kerry Russell, but I also wanted her to kind of get angry and have a bit of a steel spine and go bit a mad, and I think Kerry was up for that.

Was it important in casting them in the leads?

Well I think casting is the most important part of the process, after the screenplay. I guess I am an actor director, so that is my favourite part of the process, I always do close-up�s of my actors and do loads of takes. The most interesting thing is the human face rather than camera moves, style over substance.

What were your biggest challenges?

Well it�s the same kind of challenges, not enough time and money. Every time you wake up you compromise the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep at night, and that�s just the way it is making films.  The only thing I don�t compromise on is my actors.

You once said that �in order to communicate you have to go into the clouds yourself�. Was this applied to the film?

I suppose I just that inherent, I don�t really trust words too much, I think words are easy, so I wouldn�t be the best for dialogue as a director, I think visuals are more honest and more pure and if you can tell a story more visually it�s more universal.  It�s not intellectual, so that is what I would go for.

Any developments for the future?

Yes I have a company back home in Dublin called Blindsite Films, and we, myself and my partner, option material, option short stories, or life writers and write screenplays or commission writers to write screenplays from that material, so at the moment I am trying to produce some of that material and get some finance.

Are you hoping for a positive response from the box office?

Disco Pigs wasn�t a box office film. I am hoping that August Rush would have a mass appeal to the audience.  Disco Pigs was a tougher movie and a harder movie to sell, but it got quite good reviews. I am hoping this does too.