A night in the life of a Dublin chip shop makes ideal subject matter for director Lance Daly's new movie, The Halo Effect. He talks to Donald Clarke

In recent years, a great many younger Irish film-makers have felt the need to put together movies reflecting the brave, prosperous Ireland that came upon us in the late 1990s. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it is good to still have directors like Lance Daly knocking about. In both his mind-numblingly low-budget début, Last Days in Dublin, and its merely bargain-basement follow up, The Halo Effect, which is released to the public today, Daly has focussed on less thrusting lives.

"It may be my age, but I missed the boat and most of my peers seem to have as well," he laughs. "Everybody I know is still broke. And people I know who have jobs are broke too. I think that people in their mid-thirties and up - I'm 28 - are perhaps the ones who really jumped on board the boom."

The Halo Effect, which details a week in the life of a Dublin chip shop owner (played, with characteristic negative energy, by Stephen Rea), could be taking place at any point in the last 20 years. There are no signs of boom anywhere.

"Like Rock Steady Eddie says in the film, there's nothing romantic about being rich," Daly goes on. "If everybody is loaded, it's harder to find the conflict there. I am more drawn towards the guys in the cheap chip shop. This film was always going to be a celebration of crapness."

Daly, a good-looking young Dubliner with an unstoppable talent for banter, started out as an actor and a musician, but was always looking to move into film. "I just didn't know anybody in film until after I made Last Days in Dublin," he says. While making that imaginative first feature, a weird, comic amble round the capital, Daly kept himself alive by delivering pizzas and Chinese food. The demimonde that peopled the city's takeaways after dark spurred his imagination.

"It was just to do with the amount of madness that goes on in those places," Daly says. "The drunkenness and the eccentricity that you only see in those places at night. I started wondering why anybody would get into that business, why they would choose to run one of these joints. They turn up at four or five in the afternoon and go home at three o'clock in the morning. They just never see daylight."

When casting Fatso, the picture's hero, the film-makers required a performer at whom the adjective "hangdog" might reasonably be directed. Who better than Stephen Rea? John Kelleher, an executive producer of Halo (and this country's current film censor), met the actor in an airport and pressed the script upon him. Later a message turned up on Kelleher's answering machine. As is often the case with Rea, his tone was far from perky.

"We started listening to it and we thought, oh, he doesn't like it, because he just sounded like he wasn't at all keen," Daly laughs. "Then we kept listening and it became clear that he thought it was great and that it had plenty of energy."

So even when Rea's excited, he's not excited? "Ah no. He is just careful," Daly says, eager to defend his star.

The director peoples the film with a colourful band of grotesques and dreamers played by such fine actors as John Kavanagh, Mick Lally, Neilí Conroy and Gerard McSorley. The brave cast, working for little more than peanuts and batterburgers, found itself herded into an icy shop front on Dorset Street in the depth of winter. A lot of life happens round midnight in that part of the city.

"We had the full A-to-Z of everything that could go wrong," Daly sighs. "On the first night some guy came along with a rock and threatened to throw it through the window if we didn't give him any money." Cars were broken into, the crew were repeatedly robbed. And then there was the already notorious arson incident.

"These completely drunken guys started a fight with some of the crew. We then thought they had gone, but they went round the back and broke in and took all this petrol and poured it over the day's rubbish. We had a really serious fire in the building." This being a film set, the hoodlums were caught on video. "We showed the police the video and they recognised them, but they still couldn't arrest them. It's the law of the jungle out there."

After a month of catastrophes, Daly and his team staggered out of the shop on the final morning of the shoot to discover a weird moment of blissful calm.

"Someone said: 'Hey, look!' And we came out and you could see for miles up Dorset Street. No cars. After five weeks it was like zero hour at last. There was total silence for 20 minutes. Then suddenly the cars began again and a drunken mob fell round the corner."