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It was a chance meeting! Producer Eoin O'Callaghan's wife was working in Holloway Prison researching a stage play and had encountered Alistair Little.

He had served time in prison for a murder he committed when he was a young man. At the time Alistair was working with prison groups on conflict resolution that entailed asking difficult questions and inviting individuals to confront their past. He did this by primarily owning up to his own past and accepting responsibility.

"My wife insisted I meet this man," says O'Callaghan.

"Guy Hibbert was the obvious choice for screenwriter," says O'Callaghan. "We wanted someone who was an expert in the field of telling stories about real people. Guy is a writer I had admired for many years, particularly for his work on Pete Travis' Omagh, which he wrote over a long period of time with the real-life victims, gently recording their stories.

"I felt he was the right person to tackle the difficult and sensitive issues surrounding the film which, it has to be remembered, is essentially a fictional story albeit inspired by two real lives."

Hibbert has written many films based on interviews with real people: the victims of the Omagh bombing; victims of extreme abuse in No Child Of Mine and May 33rd. He had also based films on interviews with snipers in the Bosnian war – Shot Through The Heart – and a project looking at the experience of boy soldiers in Sierra Leone.

"With Five Minutes Of Heaven we thought that it was a good starting point to visit Alistair," says producer O'Callaghan. Alistair told us his story following which we contacted Joe Griffin, the brother of the man he had killed 33 years earlier.

"Along with Stephen Wright, an executive producer for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and Don Mullan, our associate producer, who had worked with the families on Bloody Sunday and Omagh, we made contact with Joe and the film began to take shape."

Guy Hibbert said: "It was the ´óÏó´«Ã½ who approached me after they'd seen Omagh, to explore some of the issues surrounding Northern Ireland's past and the challenges of the future. I wanted to look at the connections between the victim and the perpetrator and vice versa and so a three-year process of separate interviews and discussions with them began. The ´óÏó´«Ã½ fully funded the development of the project."

At the outset, Hibbert had to tackle the question of how he would write their stories and represent their complex feelings about each other. "I decided that the first act of the script would be an accurate account of that evening in 1975 in which Alistair killed Joe's brother," says Hibbert.

"After that, we would explore completely new territory that the rest of the story would be based on a fictional idea: what if they had agreed, said 'yes' to meeting each other? And so, collaborating with them, I developed the story from there.

"I would travel from London to Belfast and meet Joe on one day and Alistair on the next day, spending several hours with each man. I did this journey many times over two years. The method I used was to ask Joe and Alistair how they thought they would react to each other in any given situation that I presented to them.

"Then I would propose other possible reactions they might have, using the concept of a 'fictional Joe' and a 'fictional Alistair'. So we had two possible scenarios: how the real character might react and how the fictional character might react.

"When we all felt that we had exhausted our thoughts and ideas, I left them in peace, still having never met each other, and wrote the script. I then came back and sat down with each man, separately, and read them my script. Each session took about five hours. This was the first time that either had seen what I had written about them. Not only that, but also what I had written about the other.

"Joe, for the first time, was reading what Alistair thought – and vice versa. I repeated this reading process so that they could properly absorb the script. I took their comments on board and came back to them several times with rewrites."

During this process, Hibbert worked closely with Joe and Alistair to remember painstaking detail of the night of the killing and to face tough questions about themselves. They went on this emotional journey with Hibbert. What he regards as "with the greatest of courage and dignity".

"I have enormous respect for both of them," says Hibbert. "However, it was quite complicated because they weren't familiar with the process of drama. The first part of the film is set in 1975, telling the story of what really happened. It's the 30-minutes before the killing takes place in real time. This part is all true. It's an account of what actually happened, based on the interviews, which I did with the real Alistair and the real Joe.

"I would meet Joe on a Monday and Alistair on a Tuesday. I would make notes from the interviews and think about how to tell the story itself. The question I asked each of them was 'what would happen if you met?' There was never any prospect of the two meeting so I decided to start the story in reality and then use their character traits to work up a version of what could or might happen if they ever met.

"The story evolves from a factual account based on real events into a fictional narrative that explores possibilities. It is important to always remember that the story is inspired by real lives and events but it is not a true one."

Eoin O'Callaghan describes how extensive Hibbert's research was with the real Alistair and Joe: "The reason the drama took four years to come together was because Guy works painstakingly and fastidiously."

O'Callaghan explains: "He wanted to be sure Joe and Alistair would approve of what he had written and were completely on board. Only when we were at the stage where they were comfortable that their story, part-real, part-fictional was being told properly, honestly and purposefully, did we move forward."

Patrick Spence then approached Jimmy Nesbitt and Liam Neeson who both wanted to be part of the project.

"At this point," says O'Callaghan, "we had some very good luck. A project that Guy Hibbert and award-winning German director, Oliver Hirschbiegel had been working on was put on hold and Oliver had a three-month gap in his schedule. Liam had a three-week gap in filming. If we could meet this gap, and if Oliver was on board, Neeson would do it. It meant prepping the production in double quick time and getting the appropriate financial backing.

"It was a scramble to pull all the funding together in such a short space of time but we managed it. We couldn't imagine anyone better playing the key roles. Both Liam and Jimmy Nesbitt are two of the best-known actors from Northern Ireland. Their enthusiasm for this picture has been overwhelming. I think it's because it means so much to them."

O'Callaghan firmly believes it a bonus that the film's director is German: "His objectivity means he doesn't have so many ready assumptions that some of us may have."

Hirschbiegel says there was a mutual understanding between him and his lead actors: "Both Liam and Jimmy are from Northern Ireland and we had a brilliant script. That solves a lot of problems."

Nesbitt is full of praise for his director: "Oliver's something else. I was a huge fan of his film Downfall and I knew Das Experiment, again a magnificent film.

"This started off as a pretty small movie but the journey for us has been something that I've never really experienced and I've had some good times at work but he's incredibly enthusiastic, extraordinarily passionate and understanding of the importance of film and he works brilliantly with crew ... He is an artist, if not an auteur. Magnificent."

Hirschbiegel also impressed Neeson: "He's wonderful. I just can't praise him enough. His technical knowledge of cameras is quite superb. He's on top of his technical abilities. He has an ear for pain and suffering. He has extraordinary energy and he loved working with us. Here's someone from a different country who can put a different spin on it."

Neeson is also keen to stress the wider relevance of the film's story: "We're coming out of 30 years of extreme violence, hatred and mistrust and this film, although fictional is about two men who are trying to address it in some way.

"This story could easily be applied to any trouble spot in the world. It definitely has universality – an act of violence and the repercussions of that act of violence – the ripple effect of who gets affected by it. And what it takes to try and get over that."