No Ordinary Heist is directed and co-written by Colin McIvor.
Starring Eddie Marsan and Éanna Hardwicke, the movie tells the fictional story of two financial institution staff who discover themselves caught in a chilling and high-stakes state of affairs.
London-born Marsan, identified for his roles within the biopic of Amy Winehouse, Back To Black and the 2008 movie Happy Go Lucky, first learn the script when he was on vacation.
“I was fascinated by the opening, the opening first 10 pages, the idea that the bank manager and the security guard were forced to rob their own bank”, he advised BBC Radio Ulster’s Good Morning Ulster programme.
“It was a brilliant script. It was brilliantly paced out. And then when you add the music, the music in the film had such incredible tension,” he mentioned.
Cork actor Hardwicke advised the identical programme he knew scant particulars concerning the Northern Bank theft, earlier than he learn the script.
“I knew that was at the time the biggest bank heist in British and Irish history. And then I read Colin’s script and met Colin and, I suppose, realised quickly that this was very much based on those events,” he mentioned.
“It was inspired by the Northern Bank robbery but I focused and kind of foregrounded the relationship of these two men who were based on the characters, based on the men who were forced to commit this robbery.
“That’s what drew me to it.”
Hardwicke, who starred in The Sixth Commandment, said he felt it was a wise decision for the writers, McIvor and Aisling Corristine, to focus on the two men at the centre of the robbery, rather than the political events at the time.
The Good Friday Agreement had been signed just five years earlier and the Northern Ireland peace process was in relative infancy.
“The movie would not type of dive proper into the politics of that or the autumn out of that, which might be a really fascinating story to inform in its personal proper,” Hardwicke mentioned.
“But I feel by doing that you just honour the truth that that is very a lot a Belfast story, that a lot of what occurred right here occurred within the context of that metropolis with out, I suppose, grappling with the broader political ramifications.”
