Ron Shelton knows it's a tad unexpected that he should be the subject of a retrospective outside the US. But for this writer-director, the incongruity has nothing to do with the fact that most un-American audiences have not only never been to a baseball game, they have probably never even seen Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees.

No, Shelton reckons the real barrier is his all-American language. Seeing the half-court trash-talk of White Men Can't Jump dubbed into Japanese was, he says, "a Kafkaesque experience", but even worse was watching the same film plastered with German subtitles at a festival screening: "There was not one laugh. I finally slipped out to the bar and got hammered."

English-speaking countries have, he says, been far kinder to him. "The movies are never really about the game anyway - they're about the behaviour behind the game." He would gladly watch a movie about backgammon or opera - "things I know nothing about" - if it told him something about the mentalities and relationships behind the activity, he says.

Shelton's films are really about relationships, all right. Or, to be more precise, sex - with sport usually the arena for sexualised performance and competition, bats and golf clubs serving as penis substitutes, and men constantly invited to compare equipment. His non-comedy, Cobb, is essentially about the impotence of a man who used to be the greatest hitter of all time.

His women are gorgeous creations - streetwise, smart-talking . . . my God, most of them even understand sport and its compulsions. The most celebrated and celebratory of them remains Susan Sarandon as Annie in Shelton's directorial debut, Bull Durham. No mere team groupie, Annie, the film's narrator, is a Southern philosopher of the game (whether the game is baseball or love-making) who unlocks the potential in her lovers.

The men take her influence for granted, like the coach commenting matter-of-factly on a pitcher's sub-par performance: "He says his chakras are jammed and he's having trouble breathing out of his - left eyelid? left eyelid?" "Right eyelid," a teammate interrupts. "Right eyelid."

Whether they're fantasy figures or otherwise, clearly Shelton really likes the women in his films. He married one of them (three of them?), Lolita Davidovich (Blaze, Cobb, Play It to the Bone), who accompanies him to Dublin, and in conversation he rehearses the familiar lament about the dearth of strong parts for women in Hollywood.

"The women in my films have a completely different agenda from the men; they have lives outside the men's lives," he says. "I want these women to be able to be plucked out of these movies and put into another movie that's all about them." Bull Durham and White Men both conclude, he says, that "you either get the game or you get the girl - you can't have both".

All that said, Shelton - who says he used to be "the only white kid on the playground" in his Santa Barbara, California, neighbourhood, and who played minorleague baseball in the late 1960s - is proud of the portrayal of sports in his films. His latest, Play It to the Bone (having its Irish premiere at the festival), climaxes with a boxing match between Woody Harrelson and Antonio Banderas which Shelton immodestly claims is the "best fight ever shot on film".

He's equally proud of bringing golf to the big screen in Tin Cup. "I love the game" - he's looking forward to playing in Ireland, of course - "but it's really hard to make an interesting movie about 150 guys on 150 acres doing the same thing over and over. In the last sequence of Tin Cup I used up to 300 shots, just to make the hitting of five balls into the water interesting."

The basketball in White Men Can't Jump is in incessant slow-motion. "Slo-mo is so part of our vocabulary from TV, it's part of our expectation of how we view the game - if it's not slowed down, you've missed it."

Shelton bristles at the suggestion that his strengths lie more in character and dialogue than in visual style, but he admits to no particular fondness for self-consciously arty filmmakers. "My heroes are more John Huston and Billy Wilder."

Where does he stand in Hollywood? "I'm not exactly a studio guy. I'm not exactly an outsider," he says. "I do my own material. I make movies without studio involvement, although the studios finance them."

HE CLAIMS to admire the "brilliance" of the likes of Harvey Weinstein in marketing the credibility of so-called "independent" cinema, but he's also scathing about it: "Miramax is about as `indie' as Bethlehem Steel. It's Disney!"

Shelton's films, like his conversation, are often hilariously irreverent. (My favourite genre-busting moment comes when the cute, 10-year-old batboy in Bull Durham sweetly, plaintively implores Costner's Crash Davis: "Get a hit, Crash." Coster replies, with just a hint of a whine: "Shut up.")

He might not jump to mind if you were compiling the (short) list of left-wing US filmmakers, but there's no doubt where his political sensibilities lie. The Dublin retrospective includes Roger Spottiswoode's thriller Under Fire (1983), for which Shelton was script-writer; it remains one of the only films that comes next or near the truth about US involvement in Central America.

"I spend much more time concerned with political and cultural issues than reading the sports pages," he says. "And I'm as appalled by US foreign policy as ever."

His sports stories are not entirely devoid of politics. Costner, as the veteran catcher in Bull Durham, tells Tim Robbins's overeager pitcher: "Strike-outs are boring. Besides, they're fascist." And race relations are at the heart of White Men Can't Jump, in which Billy (Woody Harrelson) is repeatedly the victim of his own basketball vanity - the very quality he ascribes, in familiar racist style, to his black opponents.

Shelton is happy to tell me that White Men's "core audience" was African-American; the enthusiasm of an all-black test audience persuaded the studio to push the film all the way to hit status, in spite of the "morgue" that was a test screening in a white suburb.

But Shelton constantly turns away other people's sports scripts, and admits: "The success of Bull Durham was a curse as well as a blessing . . . . I'm definitely not going to do sports for a while."

Next, instead, is likely to be a "cop movie" - not, to be sure, conventional cops-and-robbers stuff. He tells me the latest news about police corruption and crime (including murder) that is rocking Los Angeles. "It's the worst police scandal in the history of the city, which is really saying something. It makes LA Confidential look like a fairytale."

Like John Sayles, he doesn't think the Hollywood power structure sets out to suppress political filmmaking. "If they thought they could sell Marxist movies they'd sell them. They'd sell your sister."

Unfortunately, Play It to the Bone didn't sell very well on its US release, lowering Shelton's "hitting" average to .500 (in baseball terms), as a director. He doesn't seem too worried: one of his previous "flops", after all, is a film with an ever-growing reputation - Cobb, starring an incredible Tommy Lee Jones as baseball player Ty Cobb, is a dark masterpiece about the ugly face behind a sporting legend, a film that could make you yearn for the levity of Raging Bull.

"I didn't want to give the audience a comfort zone," Shelton says, laughing at the consequences of such discomfort for the film's box-office performance. So is Cobb his own favourite? "Your favourites are the ones the world didn't embrace," he says. And you could nearly imagine Susan Sarandon speaking that line.

The Ron Shelton Retrospective takes place in UGC 5 and includes the following films, which he wrote and directed, except where noted: Under Fire (1983), directed by Roger Spottiswoode, written by Shelton and Clayton Frohman, Friday, April 7th, 2.15 p.m; Bull Durham (1988), Monday, April 10th, 3 p.m; Cobb (1994), Tuesday, April 11, 2 p.m.; Tin Cup (1996), co-written by John Norville, Tuesday, April 11th, 4.30 p.m.; Blaze (1989), Thursday, April 13th, 1.30 p.m.; White Men Can't Jump (1992), Thursday, April 13th, 3.45 p.m.; Play it to the Bone (2000), Thursday, April 13th, 8.30 p.m.