I meet renegade filmmaker Troy Duffy in a dark, downtown Toronto pub, and tell him he looks pretty good for a dead guy. Career-dead, that is.

"I know," says the director of the long-delayed The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day. "People thought I'd pulled a Grizzly Adams and was living crazy in the wilderness."

The director of an improbable DVD cult hit, 1999's trouble-plagued The Boondock Saints, not only negotiated his way through "turnaround hell" to get his film made, he sued and waited nearly a decade to see a return from millions of dollars in DVD sales.

And then, friends he'd hired to document the Toronto filming of The Boondock Saints, released a 2003 documentary called Overnight, that posited Duffy as a raging ego, a bartender with a script, lifted from obscurity, who picked fights and torched his own career.

"I watched it, and I was like 'Are you s------- me?' I remember I picked up the L.A. Times Calendar section and the headline was 'Meet Troy Duffy, the biggest a------ in the film business.'

"You can go to any Blockbuster and rent two hours of me acting like an a------. But when you don't provide the context of why Troy's acting this way, that's the failure of it. I'll cop to acting like an a------. I have said and done some stupid s---. But I've also done a lot of s--- right."

Millions of fans of the cult hit will attest to that. While waiting out his lawsuit, one of his only revenue sources was merchandising. College kids buying T-shirts, mugs, etc. kept "me and my wife and our two dogs in a $600-a-month studio apartment." Such was the durability of his cartoonishly violent tale of two Irish-American brothers (Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery) who become vigilantes against the Boston mob, becoming popular favourites among the populace as the body count mounts. What he lacked in diplomacy, Duffy made up for in determination -- delivering with a barebones $6-million budget after alienating original backers Miramax over casting differences.

And such was the loyalty of the cast and crew that nearly everyone from the original returned to Toronto for Boondock II -- including Reedus, Flanery, Billy Connolly and Willem Dafoe, plus newcomer Julie Benz (Dexter).

Which only left Duffy with the task of recapturing lightning in a bottle. " 'Cult' to me is like the coolest word in film. you can't set out to make a cult film," he says.

"But for the sequel, I investigated what makes a good sequel, because, let's face it, sequels suck. What I came up with was the successful sequels give you everything you like about the first movie, plus a curveball. So we decided on a new story with everything Boondock fans loved, except bigger -- higher body count, more humour, wrapped within a brand new story.

"It's not a rehash. I didn't wait this long just to make a film that rests on its laurels."

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