After the pictures have been taken he admits he's happier behind the camera and smilingly ponders whether his face being plastered all over the Tribune will have people shouting at him in the streets, a state of affairs that peaks after an appearance on The Late Late Show ("Howaya Neil"). It's doubtful that Jordan really needs any help from Pat Kenny to be recognised though.

He's been making movies for over a quarter of a century now and since The Crying Game bagged him an Oscar and catapulted him into the Hollywood stratosphere his films (including Interview with the Vampire, Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy) have garnered countless awards and earned hundreds of millions at the box office.

His latest offering, The Brave One starring Jodie Foster, hit top spot in the US box office charts last week. Foster plays a radio show host in love with New York who has her idyllic illusions of the city shattered when a brutal attack by thugs in Central Park sees her fiance murdered and leaves her in a coma. After recovering physically, the mental scars take longer to heal as she is crippled by fear. Eventually she snaps, buys a gun on the black market and turns vigilante, attempting to track down her assailants while righting any wrongs she comes across en route. Critics were split by the movie, perhaps confused as to whether Foster's character was a righteous avenging angel or simply insane. As ever, Jordan offers no easy answers.

"It's about this woman who finds this elemental thing in her that fascinates and appals her at the same time, " he explains. "It's interesting in one aspect that she's a woman, but that was not as interesting as the fact that she sees this forbidden thing emerge and almost wants to see how far it can go. I know there's been a lot of vigilante movies in the past, but what was interesting about this was that in all those vigilante-type films, whether they are westerns like High Plains Drifter or the Don Siegel movies with Clint Eastwood, they're all about the law not functioning and somebody taking justice into their own hands. But what happens here is that the law does function and yet she chooses to exact her own personalised and bloody revenge."

Some critics have labelled it Death Wish with extra oestrogen but Jordan is more than happy to add his movie to the vigilante canon, albeit with added grey areas in what is usually a straightforward black/white genre.

"The great thing about generic stories is that they function, if they function at all, like a greased machine. You have to excise all fat from the writing and the construction. I love revenge tales, from Jacobean stories onwards really. What I was more interested in though than the conventions of the genre, and it does exist within that world of action and consequence that these stories demand, was how the main character loses herself, or finds something in herself and loses herself in the process. And the way her fears were as much imagined as anything else and how she almost sought out these areas of conflict to satisfy some beast inside of her."

Stripped-down genre tales of this ilk generally tend to have room to carry extra metaphor baggage and The Brave One is no exception. A question on how the film relates to the current climate of fear within America sees Jordan revert to his thinking pose, stroking his chin idly as he ponders the links.

"It can be looked at in lots of ways. If you look at America as a place that was struck badly and that embarked on a series of f illadvised revenge dramas, " he says chuckling, possibly because what he just said sounds absurd, or possibly because it was right on the money, "and now finds itself in a place where they're not sure what's right or wrong and are kinda lost. You could look at it like that. The good thing about a revenge parable is that you can approach it as a metaphor for things in general or you can just enjoy it as a story.

"I spend a lot of time in America but it's actually weirdly safe, almost unnaturally. It's like it's in this strange bubble, but there's still a sense of terror all around. 'How do we deal with the wider world and who's going to strike us next?' I mean it's far less vulnerable to the idea of terrorism than Europe, Britain and Ireland but the expression of that need for safety, and paranoia and imagined enemies and stuff is far more pervasive than it is over here. So it was interesting to make the film in that context. I took New York and tried to turn it into an apparently comfortable place that became this nightmarish forest for her [Foster]. I used the city really as a large set; it doesn't pretend to be a documentary portrait of a place, but more of a paranoid landscape. I shot it as a horror movie really."

Unlike most of the movies that Jordan is associated with he didn't actually write the script for The Brave One. Foster had been passionate about making the movie for years and she oversaw early drafts of the script and set up the deal at Warner Brothers before putting a call in to Jordan.

"She asked me to consider it as a director and I read it and I found elements in it really fascinating.

There's a line where the main character says, 'It's astonishing to find a stranger inside of yourself.' And that was in the first draft of the script sent to me and as soon as I read that I thought, 'I'd better pay attention here. I'd better not just throw this in the dustbin, this is interesting."

The film has echoes of Jordan's directorial debut Angel, a revenge tale told against the backdrop of the Troubles, but he recognised that the film held an even deeper significance for Foster. "She was so engaged in the movie, almost physically obsessed with this part. And there were also resonances to movies that she herself had done in the past." The obvious touchstone to Foster's early career is Taxi Driver, with both films featuring a gun-toting New Yorker in a paranoid post-war America, but Jordan looks at it differently.

"I'd associate it more with The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs, and in a strange way that mad insane thing that happened with that guy Hinckley where he attempted a killing to win her affection, and in this she does a killing as a favour for a man she's befriended." [John Hinckley Jnr became obsessed with Foster after seeing her role as an underage hooker in Taxi Driver and took to stalking her when she attended Yale University.

Convinced she would treat him as an equal if he was famous he attempted to assassinate thenU.S. President Ronald Reagan in March 1981 to impress her.

Foster was called on to testify at Hinckley's trial where he threatened her after she denied she had any relationship with him, she regularly walks out of any interview in which Hinckley's name is mentioned. ] "I did ask her when we were [shooting] up in Washington Heights and she's covered in grime and blood and holding a gun at three in the morning, 'Are you not worried about putting yourself in this zone, with this image of you with a weapon, or being beaten?' But there is something in her that likes to explore extreme emotional states."

Jordan is no stranger to extremes himself. His next film, pending some budgetary meetings, could be A Killing on Carnival Row, a project so complex and odd that he's driven back to stroking his chin just to outline it. "Well, there's a serial killer f and a lot of Irish legends and mythical beings f in a context a bit like Blade Runner f it's tough to describe."

Given the massive budget involved, it's no surprise it'll be made in Hollywood, a generally conservative world he has somehow managed to infiltrate despite his idiosyncratic films including such oddities as a swearing Virgin Mary and ejaculating trees.

"Sometimes it perplexes me, " he admits. "After I made Interview with the Vampire and Michael Collins for Warner Brothers they said, 'What are you doing next?' And I'd say, 'I'm doing this little movie, it's not for you, you wouldn't be interested.'

"And the more I say that the more they say they want to make it. So I gave them The Butcher Boy and they said, 'What the f*** is this about?' And I said, 'Ok, don't make it' and they said, 'No, no, we'll do it.' I dunno, maybe they need movies that'll make a loss."