There have been two murder attempts on Irish writer and director Jim Sheridan. The first was by robbers in Chicago in 1972 – his friends saved him – and the second in Baltimore in 1981: ‘I met two black guys after a party. I felt they were going to attack me so I tried to get away. Then somebody – I don’t know who – told me they wanted to kill me,’ says Sheridan, famed for the Oscar-winning movie My Left Foot.

His assailants chased him into a taxi, where one of them brandished a knife. Sheridan escaped. But what of his saviour? ‘He was a white man who said, ‘If you want to stay alive, run now’. He was crying.’ Then he says intently: ‘Must have been a guardian angel, mustn’t it?’

There’s also ‘a protective spirit’ in Sheridan’s latest film, Into The West. Starring Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin, it’s a delightful and touching movie about a horse and two Irish tinker boys whose mother died in childbirth.

‘It’s about a kid who dwells in the land of eternal youth and will always do so unless he comes to terms with his mother’s death,’

says Sheridan, in his Dublin accent. ‘The horse is the emissary to make him face death.’ Sheridan, 43, stocky in denim shirt and jeans, has a dishevelled professorial air and that Woganish need to please. He ‘tinks’ quickly and ‘rabbits on’ genially, sometimes impenetrably. ‘I can talk for hours. ‘Fil-ems’ are about trying to stop yourself talking.’ He wrote Into The West in 1985, abandoned it to work on The Field and let it gather dust until 1989 when he got his ‘break’ with My Left Foot. ‘Before then, we couldn’t get it made.’ He shows no rancour for this or the fact that he’d already signed the contract, so received only $140,000 (£92,000) – studios now offer him $1 million a script. The genesis of the story is personal: ‘I’ve always lived on the fringe of society. In 1981 I went with my wife Fran and two kids to the States with $39 to my name. I was an illegal alien, earning $200 a week – answering phones in a theatre, washing floors and cleaning toilets. I didn’t get my teeth done for seven years. So when I look at the tinkers, I don’t think ‘there’s a poor tinker and I’m different’, I think ‘this is me’.

‘When Tess, our baby, was born premature and had to go into the incubator, I didn’t have the money to pay the $1,500 a day. When Fran went into hospital, I began thinking about single parenthood. My grandmother died during my mother’s birth, so I’d always been fascinated by this idea.’ His background is in fringe theatre and he still runs the Irish Arts Centre in New York, although he now lives in Dublin again. He wrote and directed tough, socially realistic plays in his pre-fame days, but was contractually unable to direct Into The West.

Has sudden success affected him? ‘People get fame heaped on them and they no longer feel vulnerable, so they’re out strutting the world. But after pride comes the fall … You also think ‘I was always good’ and blame other people that it’s taken such a long time to get there, and you’re dismissive.’ If he suffers thus, it’s not apparent.

My Left Foot yielded $35 million worldwide so the pressure to come up with something extraordinary is also a problem. ‘You fear doing anything else because you don’t know why you were successful,’ he laughs. ‘You try to reproduce the formula, but fear failing.’

He doesn’t find film easy. ‘A play is like a long bungalow. But a screenplay is like a hut built on long bamboo shoots that go through mud to an insubstantial foundation. The least movement in any scene is likely to wreck the whole house.’

When he’s writing a screenplay, he first gathers his material. ‘Then I keep telling the story to friends and I bore people in pubs and on trains. I watch their faces and fashion it accordingly. Then I write as fast as I can. Into The West took two weeks and I wrote most of My Left Foot on a flight from New York to Dublin.’

He looks pensive. ‘After the Oscar nominations were announced, I performed a two-hour play to a friend, acting all the parts myself. At the end, I realised all I wanted was to be an actor.’