"I was interested in the way that the English, I mean the southern, middle-class English, hide what they really feel," says Pat O'Connor, describing what drew him to direct his latest film, "A Month in the Country." The story (adapted by Simon Gray from a J. L. Carr novel, and bearing no relation to the Turgenev play of the same title), takes place in the Yorkshire of 1919, where two war-battered veterans spend a mending summer.

"The pain that ordinary people have, they often don't express very clearly," the Irish director says. "The English, in particular, have a way of protecting themselves which can sometimes be infuriating. But when you unlock them, they're wonderful; they're very passionate under the surface."

Audiences may be familiar with O'Connor's work from the estimable "Cal," which involved a young Irishman's tortured ambivalence over the political conflict in Ulster. That film, after more than a decade of work with RTE (the Irish television network), would seem closer to home than this "study in a certain kind of Englishness." Nevertheless, for him, the protagonists - in essence - transcend nationality.

The central figures of "A Month in the Country" are the shell-shocked, stuttering Birkin (played by Colin Firth), who has come to the village of Oxgodby to uncover a wall painting in the medieval church, and Moon (Kenneth Branagh), a superficially hearty sort who has pitched his tent just outside the church, but sleeps fitfully in a deep trench within the canvas.

Though a captain decorated for bravery, Moon has been harshly punished by the British Army for an episode of homosexuality. Like Birkin, Moon also scrapes at the past: In search of his benefactress's long-dead ancestor, he digs up the ground, reveling in the Saxon artifacts that he daily, incidentally, unearths.

Hovering over the landscape is the dour, thin-lipped Rev. Keach (Patrick Malahide) and his quizzically lovely child-bride, Alice (Natasha Richardson), a lover of white roses and green apples, with whom Birkin develops a quiet attachment.

Shooting the movie was no day at the beach for O'Connor. The story is set in the dappled English countryside, which is meant to contrast with the sorrow of the two veterans. Instead, says the director, "We had Hurricane Charlie from across the Atlantic and downpours of rain all the time." And though the novel takes place in the north of England, budgetary questions forced the director to film within a day's travel of London. Furthermore, the film had to be shot in 28 days.

"I won't do it again," says O'Connor, now casting his newest film, a psychological thriller called "The January Man." A hard edge under the soft brogue suggests that he very well might.

The director's mood mellows as he returns to characters of "A Month in the Country." "They have such sadness," he says. "These young men have been through that extraordinary, cataclysmic, shattering event of trench warfare. Birkin can't even tell the vicar's wife that he loves her, which he does. He's drowning in his own fear of being damaged any more. The trauma of the war is so colossal that it's going to affect a lot of things in his life, including his relationships.

"Moon has gone through this humiliation that a perfectly decent person experiences because he is a homosexual in these wonderful armies. He will always be alone, always wandering. I wanted people to know that he would forever be trying to cope on his own, that he's rooted nowhere. What I like about this movie is that there are more hints than anything else."

The richness of his characters is pivotal to O'Connor, who despises "a type of acting which is manipulative emotionally, and tricky." He himself casts "very, very carefully. I want good acting that doesn't need histrionics accompanying it." Nor does he enjoy conventionality: "With the part of Alice, I wanted somebody who wasn't an obvious pretty-pretty girl. I certainly didn't want a buxom girl dripping with sensuality who didn't have much else. I wanted a strangeness surrounding her."

Nor does the director have much truck with "those who stay on the surface in order to make films that are serviceable in purely entertainment terms. I can't stand films that "sell" by reassuring people in certain stereotypical ways, where things are glossy and attractive - and paced so that one doesn't dwell on what might be." O'Connor's own film could hardly be sold in that fashion. The pace is quietly human: "If you have a story about somebody with a stammer scraping a church wall and another guy digging a 500-year-old grave, you can't make it fast." Thinking a moment, he adjusts the maxim: "If you make it fast, you have no right to be doing it."

O'Connor's taste in screenplays is no less exacting, as even the estimable Simon Gray found. The first version of the script had elaborate voice-overs. That, says the director, "was not the way I thought it should be done. I felt that if I couldn't do it in the present, suggesting internal pain by performance, then I wouldn't really want to do it at all. So I did a lot of work with Simon."

Eventually, the film lay almost entirely in the hands of the small cast of players: "I find the intuition of actors very powerful," says O'Connor. "The human face is the most beautiful thing of all."

The director's taste in male characters is subtle. "There are no macho men in any of the films that I do. I can't even stand the idea. Most of the men I know are like myself, terrified, trying to deal with things, put on a brave face. The men I show - Moon, Birkin, Cal - are all damaged creatures who are trying to cope with some kind of dignity. They're certainly not hard, stunted creatures."

The softest of these may be the protagonist of his next movie, "Stars and Bars," scheduled for release this spring. Based on a comic novel by William Boyd, the film deals with the misadventures of Henderson Dores (Daniel Day Lewis), an extremely awkward English art dealer sent from New York to Georgia to purchase a Renoir from a frightening assemblage of yokels. Like many of his characters, O'Connor himself is "something of an outsider." Born in Ardmore, County Waterford, he was raised in the neighboring vi llage of Lismore, where at "8, 9, 10, I started going to the pictures with my father and had this fantastic feeling of a world outside my own, an emotional involvement with characters from different worlds who are still understandable."

Using a combination of scholarships and savings, O'Connor was able to explore these different worlds. At 14, he went off to boarding school, from which he eventually was kicked out. At 17, he went to England; at 18, to America (to UCLA), returning to England at 21. Soon after, he spent three years studying at the Ryerson Institute of Toronto, a small film school. "All I think these schools really do is give you the gear and let you embarrass yourself until you demythologize the whole business," he says. "Your talent then comes from your observations, your insights, your feelings of drama."

After finishing film school in Toronto, O'Connor began his apprenticeship in Irish television, working on everything from documentaries (in Belfast, Spain, Russia) to soap operas, to the critically acclaimed "Ballroom of Romance" and "One of Ourselves," both adaptations of William Trevor stories, co-produced by the BBC. Now, after the success of "Cal," he lives mostly in London, where he feels that "the Irish know much more about the English than they know about us, because we have to emigrate."

Asked to describe the standard English notion of their neighbors to the west, he says, "It's like a bad marriage. We've always been a problem to the English. And they've always been a major problem to us. We have both suffered from the same kinds of confused ideas about each other. But then, there's a good deal of affection as well.

"It's not all black and white. They romanticize us because they find us so expressive. They admire that, reluctantly. At the same time, there will be a general feeling that we're rather feckless, and not terribly reliable, or that we drink a lot and fight."