A documentary with frank confessions from an Irish priest who abused children in the US, and who now lives in Ireland, makes unsettling viewing. Director Amy Berg talks to Michael Dwyer.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Amy Berg's powerful documentary, Deliver Us from Evil,which deals with a paedophile priest, is that its subject discusses his crimes candidly and at length in what he describes as "the most honest confession in my life". He is Oliver O'Grady, an Irish priest who was convicted in the US in 1993 on four counts of "lewd and lascivious acts on minors" and served half of his 14-year sentence.

Berg was working as an investigative producer at CNN when she became interested in the "church abuse issue", as she puts it.

"I was in a department where there was no pressure of deadlines, and with those investigations we had to be so careful about the legal aspects," she said when we met after the recent Dublin International Film Festival screening of Deliver Us from Evil.

"I was based in Los Angeles and I had worked on some pretty heavy stories - people in prison, battered women, the police throwing evidence away in rape cases. The last piece that I did for CNN had Oliver O'Grady in it, and I became so curious about this guy. There was more information available on him than any other priest I read about.

"When I met a couple of his victims, I was really interested in knowing more about him." At this stage Berg had left CNN.

"They did not want anything to do with the story," she says. "They thought it was going to glamorise paedophilia. They were against the whole thing." She acquired O'Grady's telephone number in Dublin. "I got someone to do a public records search for me here in Ireland. And I called him. He was so forthcoming on the phone. He wanted to talk to me. He didn't want his face in anything, but he wanted his story out there.

"I flew over here to meet with him. He was still hesitant at this point, as we had only spoken a couple of times. After we met in Dublin, he became really interested in talking. We went for lunch and we went for a walk. It lasted five hours." They agreed that she would record conversations with him for however long it took.

When she returned to Los Angeles, these conversations took place over the telephone every Sunday.

"We would talk for about an hour and sometimes longer," Berg says. "I asked him if I was taking up too much of his time, but he wanted to talk to me and he had so much to say. This went on every Sunday for five months.

"Then Pope John Paul II died and Cardinal Mahony went over to Rome for the funeral. Cardinal Law was presiding over the Mass. Law was regarded as the villain at that time. He had just resigned [ in Boston] and come over to Rome. Mahony made a statement about Law and the hypocrisy of him presiding over this Mass. I told Oliver about it and he was so angry. He said, 'I want to talk now.' Mahony was his boss and we know now that he was responsible for doing more than Law in terms of moving priests around."

Berg came back to Dublin and interviewed O'Grady for eight days. "We shot most of it in the church at Dublin Castle," she says. "Towards the end, we started following him around and we asked him to show us what he would usually do. That was when this controversial video took place, when he would walk into the park and he was looking at the art show."

She is referring to the controversy when images from the film became available, showing identifiable Irish children in the background while O'Grady is on camera in Merrion Square. "This became the focus of discussion on the film here, but we were showing him doing what he's doing when we're not here. However, at the film-festival screening here, I was happy that some of the child advocacy organisations who had spoken against the film were in the audience, and they said they were going to support the film now that they had seen it. They said they were worried the film would sensationalise the issue and they now realised that it's the exact opposite.

'WE WERE SHOOTING in the park in Ireland and people walked through the camera; if that happened in America I would have been 100 per cent protected. In Ireland, I discovered, the privacy laws are different. So we decided to blur those faces, because we felt it was the right thing to do. I was trying to put myself in the position of the parents of those children. I am a parent and I know if I saw my son standing next to Oliver O'Grady in a public place, it would just make me want to call the police, not the person who made the film. The fact that he is not monitored is a much more important issue than the fact that I shot him in the park. Obviously, he wasn't going to do anything in front of the camera. Who knows how far he goes when the camera is not there?"

There was further controversy when it was claimed that Berg used false pretences to get the use of a Dublin school for a sequence in her film. "I was not there when that was shot," she says, "so I cannot answer that fully, but we did remove that footage. I needed some more video and I hired someone who went into a school and shot some footage.

"I realised that we did not have a release [ to use the school], and we were alerted that Irish parents were upset, so I took that out of the film. There is never a point where I would want to put someone in harm. I did this film because I am a parent and because I was so horrified by what this man has done and how he was protected for so long."

Berg has a 10-year-old son. I ask her if she would show him her film. "I think it's great that you have the 15A rating here," she replies, "because that's appropriate for the film, but we don't have that in the States. I think it's a parent's choice if they want their children to see the film, but no, I wouldn't want my son to see it."

As she started to put the film together, she checked the accuracy of the stories O'Grady had told her. "I found everything he said to be true, which is the exact opposite of what the Mahony spokesperson says. They are disputing everything, saying he's a criminal and asking why they should believe anything he was saying. But everything is documented and I've seen the documents. There are police reports. There are psychologists' letters.

"There are records of letters from parents to Mahony asking him to get this guy away from their family. They just ignored everything, including the police report saying that he should not be around children. The response of the church has been to try and discredit me and to say that he's a criminal. But they protected him, and if he's a criminal, then they should have taken him out of office.

"ALL THE WHILE I tried to get interviews with the church and I was turned down every step of the way. Every time I sent a request to Mahony, I got the same response, which was that they had no reason to believe this would be anything other than a slanted report. Then I went up from him to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. They refused. We went to Rome and requested interviews with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and they never even called us back."

Given the frankness of O'Grady's "confession" in the film, I asked Berg if she thought he found it therapeutic to talk to her? "Maybe," she says, "because as we mention in the film, when he was about to go to trial for the criminal case in 1993, he was meant to testify. The next day he pled the fifth [ amendment] and he didn't get to tell his story. I think he needed to say this. I felt like I was shooting a real-life horror story."

Deliver Us From Evilopened to some of the best reviews of last year in the US and earned Berg an Oscar nomination for best documentary. "We got just one negative review in a Catholic publication, but the National Catholic Reporter gave us a rave review and four stars," she says.

"So many people thanked me in discussions after screenings of the film. They said it helped them to talk to their families now. There has been so much awareness about the levels of tragedies these families have gone through. I hope this momentum will continue when the film is released in Ireland.

"If the reaction I got from the Dublin festival audience is any indication of what it's going to be like when it [ goes on release] here, there are going to be some serious demands for accountability. People here feel an extra level of personal attachment to it because of the church and state being so closely affiliated and the state owning a lot of the schools where the kids were molested."

Did she send a DVD of her film to Oliver O'Grady?

"I've been trying," she says, "but he will not give me his address. I had a new cell-phone number for him, but that was disconnected. He seems to have been in hiding since Christmas when he was seen buying coloured paper in a Dublin shop."

O'Grady may well turn up in the audience at one of the four Dublin cinemas where Berg's film opens on Friday.

Deliver Us from Evil is released on Friday