"THERE's a thing about women's films that they tend to be intimate and small scale, and I wanted to make something that used landscape and was out in the big wide world," says director Sue Clayton of her debut feature, the picaresque adventure comedy The Disappearance Of Finbar, which opens next week on Irish screens. "But I thought that I could make a broader statement about questions like where you belong and where home is."

Clayton found her inspiration in Carl Lombard's novel, The Disappearance Of Rory Brophy. "Actually, I found it in the picture on the front, and the idea of somebody jumping off a flyover in Dublin, and ending up in Stockholm. I loved the book, but it isn't the film. What I immediately picked up on, though, was this idea of a little community living under the shadow of a TransEuropean Highway."

With co-screenwriter Dermot Bolger, Clayton set out to write a screenplay which would avoid the "Europudding" traps often associated with European co productions. Together they wrote a story which takes its young protagonists from the suburban wastelands of West Dublin to the snowy landscapes of Lapland. "I thought I'd like to make a film about what's really happening in Europe, and of course Dermot is keen on those sorts of themes as well. We had this idea that it should look as if it could be happening in Prague or Naples or Dusseldorf. Rather than make it `Irish' we wanted it to be part of that Euroculture."

Newcastleborn Clayton had seen Bolger's play Lament For Arthur Cleary in New York, with an Irish audience which was "all in tears. The Geordies are very like the Irish in that respect. They won't stay in Newcastle, but they spend their whole lives being sentimental about why they left."

As Clayton and Bolger worked on the screenplay, the story's focus shifted from the glamorous adventurer Finbar (Jonathan Rhys Myers) to the more self effacing Danny (Luke Griffin), who follows Finbar to the Arctic Circle. "Danny was always the sidekick who tells the story in earlier drafts, but he became the central character," says Clayton. "Luke really did grow and blossom as we filmed. It became clearer to me that the real heroes are the ones who stay and look after people."

The Disappearance Of Finbar is Sue Clayton's first fiction feature film, after almost 20 years of award winning documentary making, and the experience was educational for her. "My favourite place is the middle of nowhere, whether in China or Africa or wherever. I'm used to heading off with a crew of six up a mountain to find out what's going on. That was my idea of making a film until I did this. Because it's a European co-production I had 11 investors, seven producers and four guarantors, nine lawyers and 12 insurers. I used to have nightmares about them all. Raising the money was difficult, but getting the investors to agree on the script was even more difficult."

Certainly, The Disappearance Of Finbar doesn't fit into any of the conventional commercial genres. According to Clayton, the audiences which have seen the film at festivals around the world over the last year haven't been worried by that. "If they like something, they don't care that it's not a romantic comedy or a thriller. I think people constantly underestimate audiences, but the real difficulty is in persuading distributors and exhibitors to give a wide release to your film. One of the lucky things for us is that Jonathan is already half way to becoming a star. Since his appearance in Michael Collins, he's done B Monkey for Michael Radford, he's done The Maker with Matthew Modine, which is just about to come out in the States, and he's just shot Velvet Goldmine for Todd Haynes, where he plays the young David Bowie opposite Ewan McGregor as the young Iggy Pop.

Clayton is pleased that The Disappearance Of Finbar seems to be receiving a serious distribution push in Ireland, with the Disney owned distribution company Buena Vista backing the film's release, supported by the Irish Film Board. "I've tried to make a film with music and humour and fun to it, that people will enjoy seeing," she says. "I've always been interested in the idea of travelling and what draws you back. I suppose it has to do with testing yourself which is what Finbar is doing." She pulls out a piece of paper, with lines from a Langston Hughes poem which a member of the audience gave to her after a screening of the film: "You know you've run all the races you can run/When you turn the last corner and run into yourself."