The latest from director Phyllida Lloyd, the feature film 'Herself', hits cinemas in Ireland very shortly having debuted on Amazon Prime in the US earlier this year. The movie follows a single mother named Sandra (Clare Dunne) who decides to build a house for her family after the housing system fails her.

The feature has been getting rave reviews and it's not the first time that director Phyllida Lloyd has impressed. She directed Meryl Streep to an Oscar win in the Margaret Thatcher biopic 'The Iron Lady'. Lloyd was also behind the movie musical triumph that was 2008's 'Mamma Mia!'

When it came to the sequel - which saw Lily James play a younger version of Meryl Streep's character, while Cher also joined the cast - Lloyd opted to produce, but not direct.

"If you direct a first blockbuster, you get the rights or whatever it is to do the sequel," she explains. "But I felt that 'Mamma Mia!' had been in my life for eight years or more by the time I came to do the film.

"It had taken me all over the world and it had given me the freedom to work on some very underpaid (she laughs) jobs, that I passionately wanted to do. And I felt that actually it had done everything for me that it could.

"I wasn't quite sure where I would have taken the story in the second one. I thought that what they came up with was ingenious and very jolly."

As for any future sequels, Phyllida Lloyd says: "I definitely won't be the person to do 'Mamma Mia 3'. I think somebody else will run with that in a brilliant way.

"You know, ABBA, those guys are touched with genius in being able to create these songs that actually little kids of five are singing, who were not part of that generation, who were not even part of that first film's generation, but were born since. And it's incredible how timeless the songs are. They're so catchy, and have such joy and merriment.

"So I feel really lucky to have chased Meryl around a Greek island with my handicam, which is what I felt I was doing in the first movie, with all the clunkiness of that. I'm proud of the spirit of it - we used to call it the 'Mamma Mia!' factor. The second movie was a little bit more glossy than our first one. But it was very much Catherine [Johnson], who wrote it, Judy [Craymer] the producer, and I, who were very much girls of a certain age. I wouldn't say so much that it was about us, but we were very much represented in that first film."

'Herself' is in cinemas from Friday, 10 October.