Irish film director Damien O'Donnell scored a major British hit in 1999 with "East is East". For his second feature he's made the low-budget but highly entertaining road movie, "Heartlands".

There must have been a lot of pressure on you, following up your hit debut movie?

Yeah, everyone was asking what I was going to do after "East is East". But how are you going to top that? If it had been my third or fourth film, as you chart the progress of your career you can see you're going somewhere. But to have a hit like that at the beginning, the only way you can go is down. It takes a while to acclimatise to that idea. It's very likely that whatever I did next was not going to be on a scale with "East is East", so in fact I embraced that notion and deliberately went low-key and small scale.

In your hero Colin - played by Michael Sheen - you have a rather geeky guy who eventually manages to win the audience round by his innate charm...

Colin is a little bit naïve, a little bit simple in his outlook on life. He's trapped in his world, settled into it, and he's perhaps become a little bit institutionalised by his life. It has a routine to it that he's not particularly interested in breaking out of.

And while "Heartlands" fits into the road movie genre, it is distinctly different from the norm isn't it?

In "The Straight Story", people imparted wisdom to this guy, or he imparted his own wisdom along the way. That's an accepted feature of road movies. I loved the fact that in ours no wisdom is imparted by anyone.

Somehow the film manages to celebrate its more eccentric characters without being mean-spirited about it. This is not just a mickey-take...

I don't think we're sending up anything in this film, we're not making a mockery of anything. I think the film revels in things that are deemed to be uncool, but I think it's fair to them as well. It could almost be a hymn to Honda 50s [mopeds] and the game of darts.