Next Thursday night, while the audience at the Irish premiere of Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace are watching Ewan McGregor playing the young Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ewan McGregor will be in Trieste, playing the young James Joyce in Nora, which finishes filming there next Saturday. Spanning eight years from 1904, Nora takes Joyce through his 20s and the early stages of his often volatile relationship with Nora Barnacle, the young Galway woman he met when she was working as a chambermaid at Finn's Hotel on Nassau Street in Dublin.
Directed by Pat Murphy, who made Maeve and Anne Devlin, Nora has been adapted for the screen by Murphy and Gerry Stembridge from the biography of Nora Barnacle by Brenda Maddox. Nora is played by Susan Lynch, the young Irish actress whose undemanding movie roles in Waking Ned and The Secret of Roan Inish did not scratch the surface of the ability and intensity she displayed in a vintage episode of Cracker.
Her prolific and versatile co-star in Nora, Ewan McGregor moves with complete ease between mega-projects such as Star Wars and smaller, more intimate projects such as Little Voice and Nora. "It's just my job," he said when we met one night on the set of Nora in Dublin. "I'm in the most fortunate position in the world now as an actor to do what I want to do. So if I want to stick with something I like, I can wait for as long as it takes for it to happen. That's the best feeling in the world.
"For me, I don't think there's one area of film-making that's the top. I don't think Hollywood movies are the best movies in the world. I'm committed to doing the next two Star Wars movies, and I want to be in films like Star Wars because they allow me the opportunity to do anything I want for the rest of my life, which is incredible."
Laughing, he tells a story against himself. "It's funny," he says. "When we were shooting a scene a few days ago there was an extra sitting behind Susan and the extra pointed at me and went, `Ooh, it's a bit of a step down from Star Wars for him, isn't it?' That made me laugh an awful lot. That attitude isn't something that I have. This movie is like a work of passion for me."
We talk while sitting on fold-up chairs by the banks of the canal near Mount Street Bridge in Dublin on a balmy Saturday night. Ewan McGregor is looking handsome in his striking period costume and wearing little gold-rimmed glasses. Bemused passers-by gather on the nearby Huband Bridge, wondering what's going on with all the lights in position, technicians bustling around, and extras in period costume walking up and down the canal. The cast are rehearsing a scene in which Joyce is waiting to meet Nora.
While the scene is set up, writer-director Pat Murphy takes time out to talk about this project which she has striven to make since she acquired the movie rights to the Brenda Maddox book eight years ago. "On film I don't think you can ever do what Joyce did," she says. "So making this film is a way of looking at his work, looking at his themes, but not actually trying to replicate what he did, which I don't think anyone can do.
"So many of the themes find their core in the events we are covering in the film - his love for Nora, his paranoia, his feeling that he would never be published, his fear that Nora might leave or be with someone else, and his writing, which is about celebrating their relationship.
"What the film is about for me is what happens when people fall in love. The series of mistakes they make. How, when you're with someone and you think you know them, and they change and then you have to change. It's about how two people who seem to be totally incompatible have this extraordinary relationship.
"I think so many people know that feeling, which is really interesting, because people should be able to see this movie and not be obsessed with Joyce - and relate to it on a very core level as this love story - though people who know about Joyce have an extra way in."
Pat Murphy admires the tenacity with which Ewan McGregor remained attached for so long. "I think the reason the film is happening is because of him, because he stuck with it for all this time," she says. "He's been attached to it since about 1996. I sent him the script and he really liked it. He came to Dublin and did a reading with Susan, and once they had read together, they seemed just so perfect. I saw how it could be. That was part of the reason I stuck with it, because I could see how great this film could be with these people playing these parts. I'm just really lucky that both of them wanted to do it and that they held it together this length of time. It's great."
Sitting and smoking cigarettes by the canal, McGregor describes playing James Joyce as "a headful". He adds, "It's good, though, very interesting to do. I just loved the script so much. I thought it was fantastic. At the time Pat sent it to me I didn't know anything about James Joyce at all, and Pat thought that was good. I've read a lot since then. Ulysses I've done in chunks. But to play the part, it was important for me to read what people had written about him, and the more I read about him the more access I had to his work. I really get his stuff now.
"His language really jumps out at me. Sometimes I'll hit a sentence that I'll read over and over again, maybe five or six times before I move on, because I can't believe how beautiful the order of the words is and how expressive he makes those seven or eight words. As a writer, his work is so beautiful."
And there is a certain resemblance there to Joyce, too. "I've worked mostly from photographs of him," he says, "and I've looked at little snippets of film that were shot of him. The photographs are very telling, I think. Actually, this early section of the film is where I look least like him. When I'm in Trieste with the moustache and the hair slicked back, I'll look much more like him."
Ewan McGregor sees James Joyce as being "like a two-sided coin - he was insecure in that he felt kind of crushed by Ireland and the way people were, to the point where he had to get out. If there wasn't something to worry about, he would manufacture something to worry about. But at the same time he was absolutely confident in himself and his writing - to the point of great arrogance, in the way that great geniuses are. I like that."
Biopics of great writers and their romantic relationships are not regarded as guaranteed box-office hits - although that may have changed after the international success of Shakespeare in Love - and getting the finance together for Nora was a long, uphill struggle.
"I just wouldn't leave it alone," McGregor says. "I've been so passionate about it for so long. Then, the first day we were shooting it, we were down there on the train station and it was the most moving experience after all this length of time."