Anjelica Huston is the director and star of Agnes Brown, the closing film in Director's Fortnight. Belying her strong-minded reputation, Nick Roddick found her charm personified and wants to join her fan club.

Stars. You spend days horse-trading with publicists, and all for 20 minutes shared with a group of blokes from Norwegian Radio. Then, to cap it all, the star doesn't show. Got a cold, stayed in bed, that kind of thing. No names, but try 'rhymes with step'.

People warned me about Anjelica Huston. Fierce, they said: mind what you say. As if I wouldn't.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Sign me up to the Anjelica Huston fan club. She's voluble, funny, doesn't duck potentially difficult questions. Which is pretty surprising since, on the day on which we speak, some 10 days or so ago, she's still doing the final mix on Agnes Browne, which closes the Quinzaine tonight.

The Oscar-winning actress both directs and stars in the film, playing a Dublin market-trader with a huge family and pressing financial problems.

It's funny, it's sad and it has Tom Jones as the fairy godmother, doing a concert and showing up on Agnes' doorstep on Christmas Eve.

"The thing that appealed to me was that the scenes have a certain roller-coaster atmosphere," says Huston. "A scene could start down and come way up, and also do the reverse: start high and then take a plunge. That was interesting for me just in terms of the dramatics of the thing. I think there was also the fact that it was in a way more of a European movie than an American one: that's a thing I feel I have an advantage on. I know that life."

This is because Huston grew up in Ireland, spending ages two to 12 in her father's house in Galway. That remained her base while she went to school in England and remained in the family until Huston was well into her twenties. Not that, as readers for whom Ireland is more than a theme pub on a 16-cities coach tour will know, a Galway childhood will necessarily have helped Huston do a Dublin one.

"Originally," she says, "when I got to Dublin, I did some round-table readings, because I wanted to listen to the script before jumping into it with real Dublin actors. I was reticent to exhibit my, er," - she gives a throaty chuckle - "vocal talents before I had got together with a coach and done some work on my own. So Marion [O'Dwyer] came in and read for Agnes."

O'Dwyer ended up being cast in the role of Agnes' best friend, opposite Huston, who plays the title role. But that wasn't always the plan.

"I'd cast another actress who had unfortunately dropped out on me two weeks before we went into pre-production," says Huston. "At that point, I'd have had to have delayed, which would have been a disaster on many counts, but primarily weather counts. So, at a certain point, I figured it would probably be easier to do it myself than to start addressing the idea of other actresses and having to go through that whole process again."

Another key performer also fell out at the last moment. Or, to be more precise, fell off. Gérard Depardieu was to have played the role of the Dublin-based Frenchman who takes a shine to Agnes, but parted company with the film when he parted company with his motorbike a few weeks before it was scheduled to shoot.

"That's film-making," says Huston. "All about compromise."

One area in which Huston didn't have to compromise, however, was in the casting of Tom Jones, who plays a key role in the final sequences of the film, and will be singing live tonight at midnight on the Carlton Beach (if you can't actually get in, don't worry: Tom has a voice too small for any mere beach).

How, I wonder, did she persuade the most famous living Welshman to appear in the film?

"I merely asked him," she says. "He's tremendously receptive and easy and generous and a really nice man. There's no easier person to work with. I didn't really ask him to play younger, because my feeling is, that part of the film is a little bit magic realism. He's an icon, and it doesn't really matter where we are in time. For me, it's sort of an eternal thing."

Agnes Browne was shot (and presold) under a different title: that of The Mammy. Surely they weren't worried about people confusing it with The Mummy?

"Actually, I think people were already confusing it with The Mummy - which may not have been a bad thing on the evidence of the first weekend's numbers," chuckles Huston. "But really, I don't know how well that title would be understood in America, whether there are negative connotations to the word 'mammy'. It was not a title that played very well."

Huston's second film as a director - following the very different, issue-driven child-abuse drama Bastard Out Of Carolina, which played at Cannes in 1996 - Agnes Browne is the first film in which she has also starred. How was that?

"I think it's probably a difficult task for anyone to be both things, but especially for women, because we spend more time than the boys in hair and make-up," says Huston. "It's kind of hard to jump back and forth because you're chronically late for everything. If you go and set up the shot, you're late in hair and make-up, so you're constantly trying to regain that time.

"Then, of course, as director, you're the last one to leave in the evening, and even then you have dailies to see, so you don't really free up at night until 11 o'clock or something. So you're chronically fatigued and chronically late. "Apart from that, it was great."