Ewan McGregor on making his directorial debut with 'American Pastoral'

The 'Trainspotting' star talks to Sue de Groot about why, after 20 years in front of the camera, he decided to take a seat in the director's chair

When you have just 10 minutes to talk on the phone with a massively talented actor who has starred in more than 60 films and decided finally to direct one of his own, you can't really begin by asking how he managed to keep his native Scottish accent while spending much of the past two decades in the US, even if that is the first thing that springs to mind when he says "Hello" in the same exuberant Perthshire voice he had in Trainspotting, the film that made him an international movie star back in 1996.

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McGregor is speaking from the UK set of T2, the sequel to Trainspotting, which might explain the ease with which he has slipped back into Scot-speak. Also, it's part of his charm. Also, it's how he speaks.

In American Pastoral, however, all traces of the heroin-addled Mark Renton from Trainspotting, and of McGregor's Highland ancestry, have been obliterated.

The Scotsman's directorial debut is set in the 1960s and based on the 1997 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel by Philip Roth, a writer of notorious density and complexity.

The first question therefore has to be: why choose such a difficult book to adapt for your first time as director?

McGregor gives a barking Scottish laugh. "I suppose I don't make things easy for myself, do I?" He has always been a fan of Roth's, he says, but did not start out with the intention of directing this film.

"I had agreed to play the father in the story some years ago, but for various reasons the film never got off the ground and we did not have a director attached. I didn't want to let it go because I loved the story and really wanted to play Swede.

"I have wanted to direct a film for about 20 years and here was this one, that I wanted to be in, and that was needing a director, and so that's how it happened."

McGregor plays Seymour "Swede" Levov, an American Jew who gets his nickname because of his blue eyes and blond hair. Swede is a former star athlete and an ex-Marine who married a beauty queen (Jennifer Connelly), took over his father's factory and is living what in every respect appears to be the American Dream, until his daughter Merry (Dakota Fanning) becomes a revolutionary and commits a violent act to protest against the Vietnam War, after which the whole fragile edifice of the Levovs' life begins to crumble.

McGregor says being a father (he has four daughters) informed the way he approached scenes with his screen daughter.

"Being a father changes you," he says.

"My eldest, Clara, is about the same age as Merry is in the film. When Clara went to college there was a sense of loss, of having to let her go - it's nothing like when Merry disappears and becomes a radical, but I felt I could identify in a small way with the loss that father is feeling."

WATCH the trailer for 'American Pastoral'

His aim was not to make the film current, even though there are many parallels with race riots in modern-day America and terrorism on a broader scale, but to stay as true to the text as possible.

"It's not really about what is happening in the world now," he says, "although it is sad that so many of the same things, and worse, are still going on. But at heart it is the story of a family."

He read the novel obsessively and worked closely with screenwriter John Romano on the narrative.

The resulting film has not been universally acclaimed, with many critics feeling that even its excellent cast cannot lift it above a somewhat static period piece, but you can't fault the bravery of the Scot who took on this arduous task.

Despite the not-entirely-ecstatic reception, McGregor will remain the irrepressible Jedi knight who lets nothing stand in his way. And hopefully he will always keep that charming accent.