HE MAY SEEM LIKE A PERMANENT FIXTURE IN THE HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER, YET BRENDAN GLEESON IS NO STRANGER TO LOW-BUDGET IRISH FILMS. HIS ROLE IN MARTIN MCDONAGH'S OSCAR-WINNING SHORT SIX SHOOTER WAS ANOTHER TOUR DE FORCE AND HIS NEW FILM SEES HIM RETURNING TO HIS ROOTS, PLAYING A DUBLIN SOCCER MANAGER IN PAUL MERCIER'S VERSION OF HIS PLAY STUDS. MICHAEL DWYER TALKS TO ONE OF THE COUNTRY'S MOST PROLIFIC ACTORS

O VER coffee in a Dublin hotel last Monday afternoon, Brendan Gleeson is beaming with pleasure that Martin McDonagh's Six Shooter collected an Oscar the night before. That dark, violent short film features Gleeson as a grieving widower and Ruaidhri Conroy as a loquacious, possibly psychotic younger man, who meet on an Iarnrod Eireann train.

"We travelled back and forward on a train between Waterford and Rosslare," Gleeson recalls. "It was great having our own train. Martin was very calm. He was less than convinced by his own ability to deal with a film, and even afterwards he wasn't sure about moving on to other films. I told him it was a way of protecting his own work and allowing it to flourish, rather than handing it over to somebody else. He writes great dialogue and he gave really good direction."

Down the credits of Six Shooter is Gleeson's son, Domhnall, who is now acting in the New York production of McDonagh's play The Lieutenant of Innishmore. "The reviews have been great," says Gleeson Sr. "I'm delighted for him. I hope it goes to Broadway now."

Did he encourage Domhnall who, at 22, is the eldest of his four sons, to follow him into the acting profession? "Not especially," he says. "When they were kids I never felt I wanted any of them to become part of it. I was very wary because, as a kid, it's very easy to be pulled out of shape. Once they became their own men, it was up to them. I thought Domhnall would have ended up on the other side of the camera because he's talented in that way. Then he auditioned for the London production of Lieutenant of Innishmore, and that was it. He was besotted by it."

Gleeson's third son, Briain, will join his father in the cast of John Boorman's The Tiger's Tale, which starts shooting in Dublin on Monday week.

"He's doing his Leaving this year, so I didn't think it was such a good idea, but he auditioned for it. So what do you do? If you're a plumber it's quite on the cards that your sons are going to be plumbers."

Meanwhile, Brendan and Domhnall Gleeson share screen time in writer-director Paul Mercier's assured first feature film, Studs, in which Domhnall plays the hapless goalie in a bottom-of-the-league Dublin football team, and Brendan stars as Walter Keegan, their inspirational but unorthodox new manager.

Now 50, Brendan Gleeson started later than most as an actor. He was 34 when Paul Mercier encouraged him to quit teaching for acting. "I've known Paul for 30 years," he says. "I had done some theatre on an amateur basis, and then I met Paul at university. What struck me was that he had no fear at all. If he had an ambition to put something on the stage, a rock musical as Gaeilge or whatever, it was going to happen. Without coming into contact with him and his fearlessness, I doubt if I would have ended up pushing it to the extent that I did.

"Then he started the Passion Machine. He was intent on doing what was relevant, going into places where people wouldn't normally go and drawing in people who didn't go to the theatre. It was a very exciting time. People want to see subjects that interest them reflected in plays and films, and I feel the film of Studs will connect with people in the same way."

When Studs was first staged here 20 years ago, it was, I note, a very different Ireland. "Yes, but there is an emptiness to this frantic lifestyle people have here now," Gleeson says. "There is a lack of community or any sense of belonging to anything. People live in tiny boxroom apartments with no room for kids or old people. People don't know their neighbours and they meet other people in clubs where nobody can hear anyone. I really don't want to get into grumpy old man country, because it is vibrant here, too."

Although he later appeared in a Liverpool staging of Studs, he was not in Mercier's original Dublin production. "One of my sons, Fergus, was arriving on the planet, so it was the first production I didn't do with Paul. I remember the opening night and I was in the audience, seeing a Passion Machine show for the first time from the other side. It was visually stunning and incredibly powerful. Paul's theatrical work has always had a cinematic feel and I've wanted for years for him to do a feature film.

"He and Martin McDonagh are very similar in that respect. They're incredibly focused on what they want, and uncompromising on how they want things to be artistically. When they went into the different medium of film, both were so open to learning and would allow other people to inform them of what was and wasn't possible technically."

Now Brendan Gleeson is poised to make the leap himself. He is adapting Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds as a screenplay, which he hopes to direct, having directed some stage productions in his time. "Cillian Murphy, Gabriel Byrne and a couple of other people have come on board," he says. "The novel has this menagerie of mad characters, so many of them, although of course there's more to it than that. It has a great visual quality and every time I read it, I can feel it being acted out."

Working on Studs in cold locations in Lucan reminded him of his Passion Machine days, he says. "There was the same huge sense of camaraderie there, and all this huge sense of challenge, as well. There wasn't an awful lot of money to do anything, but, just like the team in the film, everyone was fired with enthusiasm and very little else. I have to say I revelled in it.

"We made it for just over a million, which probably would get you a trailer or maybe the film stock on some other films I've done. We were cutting it a bit fine and could have done with a bit more leeway at times. But, just as in the early years of the Passion Machine, necessity became the mother of invention. Problems would arise completely unforeseen and Paul would tackle them. That's where he comes into his own, when he has to be inventive. He's amazing when he works in those conditions."

Gleeson's prolific output in recent years has involved moving between small-to-low-budget Irish productions - I Went Down, Breakfast on Pluto, Studs - and lavish epics such as Gangs of New York, Cold Mountain, Kingdom of Heaven and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which inevitably pay better and boost his respected international profile.

"I don't like going away for long periods," he says. "And you spend so much time waiting around on those big film sets. I probably spent about five months on Gangs of New York. We were shooting in Rome, so that wasn't a hardship and I was able to go back and forth. But my scenes kept being pushed back for all sorts of reasons, which saps the energy.

"I've done a few of those big pictures and I wondered if I was doing too many, but in order for me to get, say, the Walter Keegan role in Studs, I have to have done something else. And when you get to work with people such as Martin Scorsese, you can't complain.

"I felt I had done enough epics and then I did Kingdom of Heaven. Ridley Scott is a terrific director of actors and my role was based on a real person, which always interests me. And it was a very short shoot - two or three weeks. That was an absolute joy. Why would anyone get pangs of conscience about doing those films?"

Four months ago he finished shooting in Los Angeles on Beowulf, the Robert Zemeckis film based on the eighth-century epic poem. He notes that "the scale was tiny" because it employed motion capture, a process defined as the recreation of a 3-D representation of a live performance, which Zemeckis used on his previous picture, The Polar Express. Gleeson explains: "That means you dress up in a Babygro, a skin-tight blackleotard - I looked particularly silly in it, whereas people like Angelina Jolie and Robin Wright Penn can get away with it! And you get about 140 dots stuck on to your face. Everything is scanned and goes into the computer. You don't stop for close-ups because they have them. It's like black box theatre. It was very exciting to do because of all the possibilities it offers. Usually, 80 per cent of a movie is in the shooting and the rest is in post-production, but that's flipped with this film. We shot what would usually take about 18 months and we did it in six weeks."

He is very happy that his next movie will be made in Dublin - The Tiger's Tale, in which he heads a cast featuring Kim Cattrall, Ciaran Hinds, Brenda Fricker, Sean McGinley and Sinead Cusack. Written and to be directed by John Boorman, it sounds thoroughly intriguing.

"I play a property developer working in Celtic Tiger Ireland," Gleeson says. "It opens in a traffic jam. Everybody's stuck in this mad rush to get nowhere. He's already questioning what's worth anything about what he's doing. Then he sees his double, which really freaks him out, because this guy appears to be stalking him."

Boorman first directed Gleeson in The General, a movie that demonstrated how firmly he commands the screen in a leading role. "Just having a role such as that is so challenging and satisfying at the same time, and then it was exhilarating to be part of that great team," he says. "There was also a sense of danger about it because we didn't know how it would be received in any quarter - the cops, the criminal fraternity or the establishment in general. I remember at the premiere Mary Harney deliberating taking her hand away because she wasn't quite sure if this was something she wanted photographed. But the film had integrity and we knew what we were doing was not exploitative."

Last month Mary Harney's Department of Health came in for a stinging attack in a detailed e-mail Gleeson sent to Marian Finucane after he witnessed the experiences of his elderly parents in the Irish hospital system. "Marian was great for reading it all out on her radio show, because it was so long. I was trying to keep it concise, but I can't articulate the outrage I feel about the way older people are treated by the system. It makes me question what it is to be Irish. Just as people use that phrase un-American, what's happening in these hospitals seems un-Irish to me.

"We've never treated our old people like that ever before. There has been neglect and some scandals, but this is social cruelty and everything seems so systematic and deliberate. They are trying to operate it as if it were a corporation where everything is a separate issue - the nurses, the cleaners and so on - and it's all down to the bottom line.

"The people in charge have no connection with the patients, and nobody takes any responsibility. They are putting a business template on to a caring profession, and that cannot be done successfully. My whole belief in the notion of willing politicians is completely shattered. I don't believe these people actually care. If they did, they would relieve the situation. There's no excuse for not relieving it. I feel like asking John O'Shea to come to Ireland and sort out our A&E system."

Studs opens next Thursday