And that's a rap...

It's hardly surprising that the life of bullet-riddled gangsta rapper 50 Cent has made it to the big screen. After all, few other hip hop stars have so ruthlessly exploited their life story to shift their product.

No, the eyebrow-raising factor in Get Rich Or Die Tryin' is its director: Oscar-nominated Jim Sheridan, the man behind such films as My Left Foot, The Field and In The Name Of The Father. What is he up to? Somehow, you don't expect the 56-year-old Dubliner's answer to be that he's a rap fan.

'I've been listening to hip hop since the early 1980s,' he cheerfully reveals. 'Bono knew that I liked the music and he took me to a party with the head of Interscope, Jimmy Iovine. I was talking to him and Dr Dre about rap and the people I liked in it and they sent me the script.'

There's no denying that the details of 50 Cent's journey thus far sound more like a film script than real life. Orphaned at eight years old when his drug-dealer mother was murdered, by the age of 13 Curtis Jackson III was selling coke and quickly began pushing crack when it hit America's ghettos in the 1980s.

After trouble with the law and other dealers, he decided hip hop was a safer way to make money. But on the eve of a big recording contract, a gunman pumped nine bullets into him as he sat in his car.

Miraculously, Jackson survived. Even more surprisingly, despite his slurred, monotonous delivery and repetitively thugged-out lyrics, he's gone on to become the biggest thing in rap music, with his second album breaking industry sales records.

Musically, he's not as experimental or out there as NWA or Eminem,' says Sheridan, who admits he hadn't heard much of Fiddy's music before meeting the man ('he'd done one bloody album, you know'). 'But I like what he does because it seems so honest. There's also a kind of contradictory thing because he takes capitalism at such face value that it almost becomes a reverse of it.'

There are also, importantly, elements to his story that fit with the type of movie Sheridan favours - gritty tales with an epic sweep that show real triumph in adversity. And he was allowed a fairly free hand in adapting Jackson's life.

'I rewrote the script a lot,' says Sheridan. 'In the original, he killed four people; it was a shoot 'em up, which I thought was ridiculous.

I thought that there was a responsibility not to just show complete stupid gangsterism. I tried to make it anti-misogynistic and I didn't want to glorify the violence and the crack - I showed that at the end of the day, if you get shot, the money's not going to f**king help.' Sheridan has no qualms about voicing his own uncertainties.