It would be a big fat lie to suggest that, if brought into her company without a proper introduction, you could easily guess who Kirsten Sheridan's dad was. After listening to a few minutes of her agreeably meandering conversation, you might not, however, be hugely surprised to discover that she sprang from the loins of the director of My Left Foot.
Jim Sheridan and his daughter both approach interviews with agreeable informality. Anecdotes tumble out gaily. Ideas are hummed and hawed over. An easy saloon bar levity permeates the room.
If you've seen In America, Sheridan senior's touching 2002 movie, you probably think you already know the younger film-maker. That picture followed a family of Irish bohemians as they clattered around rougher areas of New York in the 1980s. The da was a little bit like Jim and the daughters had something of Kirsten and Naomi Sheridan about them. Kirsten, who wrote the picture with her dad and sister, does not deny that the tale was, indeed, deeply autobiographical.
There was, it is true, something of her grandparents' story in the film's treatment of the death of a young child - a homage to Jim's late brother - but otherwise, In Americais an accurate representation of the Sheridans' Manhattan odyssey.
"Yeah, here you had Samantha Morton playing my mother, who was really my grandmother," she says. "And she was pregnant and I was pregnant at the time, but nobody knew. It was mad. So I said to my dad: 'I will send you the therapy bills.' It was all just too Freudian. It was too much."
It is more than 20 years since Kirsten, now 31, padded after her father through the streets of Hell's Kitchen, but New York has clearly stamped itself firmly on to her psyche. The director's mad, ambitious second feature, August Rush, is alive with the city's rhythms and smells. Following young Freddie Highmore's musical prodigy as he falls in with a street musician played by (gulp!) Robin Williams and then gets to conduct a symphony in Central Park, the picture plays like a puzzlingly transmogrified version of Oliver Twist. August Rush had 10 times the budget of her first feature, the 2001 adaptation of Enda Walsh's play Disco Pigs, and it shows.
"The producer, Richard Lewis, originated the idea at the birth of his son," she explains. "He was brought back from hospital and this hand came out and moved to music in the background. The doctor said: 'Look, he is conducting already.' Then he saw Disco Pigs and the film has this scene where two babies are born, reach out and hold hands. He saw a connection there."
It must have been quite a shock moving from the cosy world of Irish film, where everybody knows everybody else, to the cesspit that is Hollywood. August Rush, which stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Keri Russell as the hero's parents, is a proper movie with special effects, crowd scenes and a lot of other stuff that costs real money.
Kirsten, barely 30 when shooting, must have had to pinch herself frequently. "What surprised me - naively I suppose - was that I thought, with 10 times the budget, you'd get 10 times the time, but actually I seemed to have less time than on Disco Pigs. Mind you, I suppose you never have enough time or money. If you want to just move across the street you discover that there is a huge operation. You have catering. You have to get permission to shoot everywhere. You just don't have that mobility."
THE CHARACTER PLAYED by Rhys Meyers - a sometime rock star who flees Manhattan for San Francisco after a brief liaison with Russell - was originally supposed to be a rebellious American in the mould of James Dean, but, when Sheridan came on board, the producers decided to take the Celtic route. Another apparent allusion to the old country is, it seems, entirely unintended. Robin Williams, all cowboy hat and guitar, turns the pseudo-Fagin into a weird, slightly superannuated Bono. It is quite an unsettling amalgam.
"I know! It's completely weird," Kirsten exclaims. "Somebody sent me this clipping during the shoot and it has a photo of Robin shooting in New York. It said: 'What's Bono doing in Central Park?' That wasn't intended. He just found this cowboy hat and became quite attached to it. We went through a number of people when thinking of the character - Boz Scaggs, Tom Waits, Jimi Hendrix - but never actually thought of Bono."
It's hard to escape the conclusion that August Rushmight have something to say about Kirsten's own childhood. The hero is born to creative parents and, from an early age, finds himself driven to make his own art. It seems you can't escape those bohemian genes. From as early as Kirsten can remember, her father was knocking together plays, developing films or writing little bits of this and that. She admits that it was an exciting environment in which to grow up, but those early years in New York were not entirely idyllic.
"It wasn't like anybody else's family life, but at times you kind of wanted it to be," she says. "At a certain age you just want to be normal. You'd go round to somebody else's house and they'd always have carpet on the floor and they wouldn't run out of things. You'd open their medicine cabinet and it would be full to bursting. We sometimes wondered if everybody else's parents were hairdressers, because they were all so neat and we'd all be a bit shaggy."
Still, she admits that, for the most part, the New York years were wildly exciting. Her parents would often wake the kids up in the night and introduce them to benignly drunken actors and artists.
Besides, living in what was then a poor area of Manhattan, they were constantly rubbing up against people considerably less well off than themselves. She remembers maintaining a sense of proportion about their circumstances and finding each day a thrill.
Was the return to Dublin a little like the beginning of Angela's Ashesthen, I wonder. The city must still have seemed very grey in the late 1980s.
"Well no. It was exciting because when we came back we came back to shoot My Left Foot. That was really exciting. I got to play a small part and that whole summer was taken up with exciting stuff."
KIRSTEN'S DRIFT INTO the arts now seems inevitable. But was it? There must have been a temptation to rebel against rebellion and take up a career in quantity surveying or fish farming. It is not unknown for artistic impulses - like alcoholism - to skip a generation.
"Yeah, I know. Be like John Major - run away from the circus to take up banking," she laughs. "When we were younger we were in the theatre a lot. Dad would bring us down there and we would be really bored. But in retrospect we were actually getting into it at an early age. But, like most kids, I wanted to be a cop and a fireman and all that. Then I reckoned I might get into photography. But, eventually, the temptation to combine acting, writing, photography and all the rest in film proved too hard to resist."
Kirsten made a lot of noise very quickly. Patterns, her thesis short film from Dún Laoghaire College of Art and Design, picked up several mantelpieces of international awards and propelled her towards that successful adaptation of Disco Pigs. She has subsequently completed a script based on the life of Olga Korbut and is currently preparing a comedy - "a sort of Walter Mitty thing" - set in, of all places, Doncaster.
Having spent a few years making movies, she must, surely, have mused upon one of the great mysteries of the business. It is more than a century since the birth of cinema, yet female directors of feature films are still puzzlingly thin on the ground. What gives? "I don't know. It is strange," she says. "But part of it might be to do with that thing where, when you tell producers you have children, they say they understand and so on. But they don't really. They say: 'Yeah, yeah. We get it.' But do they? I think those logistics are a large part of it."
Sheridan now has her own family to juggle. Back living in north Dublin with her partner Seán, a student of psychology, she is a happy mother of two noisy children. It is, indeed, only four months since the birth of her second.
"It's grand. We're not sleeping, of course. But I am back living near Croke Park where I lived as a kid and that's all great."
Good stuff. You can't keep those Sheridans down.
August Rush goes on general release tomorrow
