As with her previous four films, Mary McGuckian's Rag Tale is packed with big-name actors. She tells Donald Clarke how she does it.

 I first came across Mary McGuckian 24 years ago at a physics lecture in Trinity College Dublin. It was our first day as engineering students. I fitted in embarrassingly comfortably with the cadre of lank-haired, socially maladroit men in duffel coats, which made up the main body of the class. McGuckian, who has eyes the size and shape of kiwi fruit, did not. Arriving a few minutes late for the lecture - could she have planned it? - dressed in proper, grown-up clothes and carrying an enormous gold bag, she immediately curtailed any consideration of wave-particle duality. To use an analogy easily understood by the average engineering student, it was as if Galadriel had chosen to spend some time with the orcs.

McGuckian's career has lived up to that dramatic entrance. After graduation she decided to leave the bridge-building to others and, making use of her experience acting and directing for Dublin University Players, took to the stage.

She devised a two-handed Macbeth with Alan Gilsenan, now a distinguished film director, and performed a few roles at the Abbey. She mounted a production of her own version of The Midnight Court, in London. She studied in Paris. Then, in the mid-1990s, her pal Jim Sheridan nudged her towards the cinema.

Over the past decade she has directed an astonishing five feature films and has worked with a bewilderingly impressive array of movie stars.

"Well, actors are important to me because they tell the story," she says. "Neil and Jim are famous directors. I don't have that personality. They are very sure of who they are. I just like working with actors and find that is what makes the film work."

YES. WELL. YES. But how on earth does she do it? How do you go about getting De Niro or Keitel or Jason Leigh to appear in your film? Does she have a wish list on which she refuses to compromise?

"Sometimes you do," she says. "On The Bridge of San Luis Rey I was specific, and that turned out to be a phenomenal cast. It is a very beloved book in America and that was about writing out a dream cast and just having a go. I never believed that would happen. Back with Words on the Window Pane I exceeded my ambitions. With Rag Tale there were a lot of actors I had worked with before."

I'm still not much the wiser as to how she has lured all these prestigious actors into her pictures. Does she have a strategy? Does she have incriminating photographs?

"Well, you have to make it clear that this one is not one they are doing for the money," she says. "Then I do a favoured-nation thing. All the main actors get paid the same amount. Even with a large cast like Rag Tale they are all on the same rate."

I can't help but think that the steely confidence McGuckian has always displayed must help her win over wavering stars. One can't imagine her withering fearfully before the talent.

"It depends on what you are doing," she says. "Robert De Niro is definitely a bit of a legend. I defy anybody not to pinch themselves in those circumstances and say: 'This is De Niro.' But it was interesting the way he made a point of helping me be comfortable. He would go over and over details of the script and I eventually realised that was a way of helping me get past the legend."

McGuckian's ability to sell herself may be wired into the genes. Her father is the agricultural entrepreneur, Alistair McGuckian, famous for heading up the Masstock livestock system and, more recently, for devising the large-scale musical, The Ha'penny Bridge.

"He is great on business stuff," she says. "But also on world view. He is not in business for the sake of it. He enjoys making things happen and now he writes music too. So he is a very inspiring person as well."

Sadly, The Bridge of San Luis Rey did not fare well with the critics in the United States and no release date has yet been scheduled in these territories. McGuckian feels that an unsatisfactory cut was released in the US and is still hopeful that the film, a period piece detailing the stories of several people destined to die when a bridge collapses, will soon turn up on these shores.

Until then we have the - quite literally - dizzying Rag Tale.FOCUSING ON THE doings of a newspaper not dissimilar to the Sun, the film seeks to ridicule the tabloid preference for celebrity gossip over real news. There is much juicy satire in the picture, but the nauseating camera angles and staccato editing make the action very hard to endure. What on earth is going on?

"Some people have said it is a little like Natural Born Killers on speed," she says. "I think film has still a leap to make in terms of visual sophistication. We have a younger audience used to pop-up internet screens, MTV and a style of TV drama that is much more radical than most film. Now we might have made more of a leap here than people are quite ready for."

The extraordinary cast improvised much of the picture after McGuckian and her crew spent time researching the logistics of newspaper production. Given the director's ability to attract celebrity personnel, we should, perhaps, not be surprised to hear that Carl Bernstein, one half of the team that broke Watergate, was a technical adviser. Once again, I ask, bewildered, how she comes across such people.

"Oh, you just happen to sit beside him at some sort of literary conference," she says blithely.

Rag Tale forms the first part of a proposed trilogy. The second film, Intervention, is to deal with therapy culture, while the third will focus on the film industry. Whereas John Lynch appeared in each of McGuckian's first four films, he is not to be found in Rag Tale and, the director suggests, may remain absent from the latter sections of the trilogy. Have they decided that it is better to go to work in separate offices?

"I think we probably have," she says, laughing. "It is a bit healthier, maybe. It puts extra pressure on what you do when you are both there. It is alienating for crews to think you have more of a shorthand with one actor. Other actors don't want their directors to have another life. They don't like that they have breakfast with somebody else. They like to think that all the attention is directed at them. John is a very good actor and a very good person to have on set. But there are other good actors out there."

And if they are out there then, however lauded they may be, McGuckian will bag them.

Rag Tale is on limited release