David Caffrey doesn't seem like a man in a hurry. There's nothing noticeably febrile about his demeanour - an ordinary man from Greystones in an ordinary pullover.
Yet the unnecessarily young film director has accomplished an enormous amount in the past four years. In 1996, he was still dragging low-budget short films round the festival circuit. Now, at 32, he sits in a nice comfy chair promoting his second feature film, On The Nose, an agreeable old-fashioned comedy starring Robbie Coltrane and Dan Aykroyd.
"Well, one week my girlfriend and I are sitting in my flat counting the pennies and the following week we're being driven around in limousines and staying in the Clarence Hotel," he explains. This is very modest of him, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Caffrey has achieved the sort of rapid success of which most of his contemporaries could only dream.
His first feature, the Northern Ireland comedy Divorcing Jack, featured classy actors David Thewlis and Rachel Griffiths. This was rapidly followed by the BBC's lavish adaptation of Stella Tillyard's historical tome, Aristocrats.
Yet nobody in this incestuous business seems to hate Caffrey's guts. How does he do it? "Well, a lot of it is definitely luck," he says. "But also I think that absolute honesty is important, too - I always tell the truth. When I met the producers of Divorcing Jack, I was terrified. But I had read Colin Bateman's book and I was passionate about it. If you're that passionate, they start getting a bit nervous. We might be about to miss something here, they think. With Aristocrats, I went in and I said how honoured I was that they had called me in because I really know bugger all about the 18th century. Back to honesty again, that works."
Having talked one's way on to the project, then of course one has to actually do the job. Caffrey still shudders slightly when recalling his first days on Divorcing Jack.
"I had sore jaws from grinding my teeth at night. A blinding buzz of nervous energy completely consumes you. You just have to pray that you're making all the right decisions. People will try and press their opinions on you, but it's important to stand your ground. At the end the film might be rubbish, but at least it's your rubbish.
"The great thing for me was that David Thewlis was on my side: supportive, helpful. Now, your main actor is on set as much as you are, so that's important."
Caffrey's luck has come good again with On The Nose. The Dublin film, largely a Canadian production, looked like it was going to drift off without a theatrical release, but it was unexpectedly picked up in Ireland by Buena Vista Pictures. The director himself was surprised and delighted to discover that he would be attending a premiΦre after all. Though hardly radical, one can see what interested the distributors in this cuddly film.
Coltrane plays Brendan Delaney, a porter at a fictional Dublin medical school who discovers that a bottled Aboriginal head can predict the results of horse races. After the Day-Glo modernity of the Irish comedies When Brendan Met Trudy and All About Adam, On The Nose feels like a return to a gentler age.
"Yes, the whole thing with college porters is very olde worlde, very Dublin," Caffrey agrees. "And it does cover four generations of a Dublin family. I did try to keep it contemporary in some ways. Coltrane's son is into techno music, for example. But other than that, it could be placed any time. I even made sure that the car that Eanna MacLiam's character buys is a Ford Escort Mark One. That was the same car a guy I knew had who used to work with me in a glue factory in Tallaght years ago."
The film does work as squashy comfort food of a winter evening, but the characters do verge on the twee. Moreover, when we meet Brendan's eccentric family, there is the slightest whiff of reheated Roddy Doyle in the air.
"Well, I was worried," Caffrey admits. "You could have ended up with The Snapper all over again, but we really worked hard to get away from that. Fortunately, with Robbie Coltrane and Brenda Blethyn (as Brendan's wife) in there, they do bring a whole different dynamic to it. The Snapper has a grittier feel to it. Our story is certainly believable, but it is slightly heightened.
Bravely, the film deals mainly with middle-aged characters. Aside from Coltrane and Blethyn, the focus is on Aykroyd, who plays the head of the medical school. I wonder if Caffrey feels that featuring this age group might make the film hard to market. "Well, that's more a back-end problem - a sales problem. If you start worrying about those sort of things, it's suicidal for the project. If you make it funny enough then the public will be won over anyway."
It comes as no surprise to hear that he is now shuffling half a dozen potential ventures around: domestic dramas, scripts about Johnny Rotten and country-music legend Gram Parsons. The most intriguing project is the life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, inspired by Fintan O'Toole's recent biography. "Just like Aristocrats, I thought it's 18th century, but it's still a great story," he says. "It's getting a lot of heat. All kinds of people are phoning us about it and asking to meet up."
It seems as if Caffrey has managed to establish two quite distinct profiles: the nutty Irish comedy bloke and the flouncy 18th-century bloke. "Yes and it's weird," he says. "Because the people I actually admire most are people like Alan Clarke and Ken Loach: that gritty naturalism. One of my favourite movies is Clarke's Rita, Sue and Bob Too. The sort of film where the humour doesn't come from jokes but from who the people are."
Which actually isn't so weird at all. In fact, this pretty much sums up the appeal of On The Nose. But if you miss it, don't worry. At the rate he works, there'll be another Caffrey vehicle along in a week or so.
On the Nose is currently on release