Inside I'm Dancing (15)

IRISH film director Damien O'Donnell can make you laugh, he can make you cry.

Remember the Mancunian Asian tale East Is East and, if you were lucky enough to see one of its scandalously rare screenings, Heartlands?

He will make you laugh and cry again with his new social drama, Inside I'm Dancing, if you give him the chance.

The prospect of seeing two blokes in wheelchairs, one with muscular dystrophy, the other with cerebral palsy, may not make your popcorn go pop when standing in the multiplex queue, wondering what to see tonight, but why not give it a go, and take a rollercoaster ride with Rory O'Shea and Michael Connolly in Dublin?

"To me, this is primarily a film about friendship," says O'Donnell. "It just happens to be a friendship between two disabled people. It's about their journey of leaving the institution, finding someone to assist them with their physical needs and the consequences of living outside an institutional environment."

The two friends, Rory (James McAvoy) and Michael (Steven Robertson), are contrasting characters: a dynamic vital to the film. "Rory is frustrated. He has the more energy, dynamism and bravura of the pair. His muscular dystrophy condition means that he is physically disabled, but inside there's this electrical storm buzzing away. You can feel it radiating from him and feel his frustration in that he has limited physical means of expressing himself," says O'Donnell.

"Michael has a quiet intellect, but his environment doesn't allow him an opportunity to think for himself. When he finally meets a challenge, in the shape of Rory and his desires, he blossoms and, in turn, his steadfastness focuses Rory's energy. Neither of them is exotic or exceptional; they're human, flawed, selfish."

Had O'Donnell considered casting disabled actors for the roles? "Part of the problem we faced was people only seeing the disability and not the person behind it; and this film is not about bringing muscular dystrophy or cerebral palsy alive. We've seen that before with Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot. We needed someone to bring the characters alive. We did scan for disabled actors and I presumed we would be casting Irish actors, but the best two people were Steven and James, and they were both Scottish!" he says.

"My big problem was whether, surrounded by an Irish cast, they would sound Irish. You had to believe in the characters and you had to believe they were Irish... and they're two fantastic actors."

Steven had caught the eye of O'Donnell's casting director in a Manchester production of The Seagull. "He said we had to see him," O'Donnell recalls. "I thought about moving the whole thing to Scotland, where I've lived and loved it, but then I thought, no, let's make it work in Ireland."

The roles were physically demanding. "It's definitely not method acting. Their muscles were incredibly tight all the time: James had to maintain that stillness of Rory's head. They had to have massages regularly to stop them from getting sick or physically injured," O'Donnell says.

O'Donnell did not have the best of experiences with film producers Miramax, who marketed East Is East in America as a teen sex comedy and showed so little faith in his English B-road movie, Heartlands, that its promotional budget was only £60,000. By contrast, Momentum is giving Inside I'm Dancing its best shot.

"With any film that doesn't have big names or the appeal of a specific genre, the hardest battle is to get people in the queue to choose this one. It will come down to word of mouth. East Is East had that; Heartlands did too," says O'Donnell

With shades of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and My Left Foot, a lazy shorthand would bill O'Donnell's film as One Flew Over My Left Foot. However, what does he hope audiences will think?

"I hope the film will make non-disabled people reassess their impressions, admit their ignorance, revise attitudes and shake prejudices," he says.

"I learnt a lot making this film. I had little or no experience of what it means to have a physical disability and how society presents so many barriers, physical, psychological and emotional, to getting on with everyday life."

Shall we dance?

Inside I'm Dancing (15) opens Friday, October 15.

Updated: 08:23 Friday, October 15, 2004