This is the second half of my interview with director Oliver Hirschbiegel.   His film Five Minutes of Heaven, which stars Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, opens today.

Maria:   You got so many the details of the time and place so right (the Ford Cortina, the Georgie Best poster, etc.).   One image I wanted to ask you about, the man who’s wounded and looks like he’s doing a breaststroke on the cement, where did that come from?

Oliver:   It’s documentary footage and I asked about that.   Nobody could tell me what that incident really was.   It was a shooting documented by this camera crew but nobody knew who that man was.   Nobody could tell me if he was injured and hurt, trying to crawl away from that, or whether he was just in fear that he would get shot if he got up and walked, but I thought it was such an intense image that I had to use it.   And it’s never been used before.   I tried to basically go documentary images that hadn’t been overused over time, and some of them you know of course, but there are quite a bit that hadn’t been used before.

Over the years, I’ve watched a lot of footage on “the Troubles” and Five Minutes really was fresh in that way, it wasn’t the same old, you know, the priest waving the white hankie in Derry.   When did you actually start this project and begin filming?

We started shooting”¦.oh, it was in such an incredible short time.   I went for the first time in my life ever to Belfast in middle of March I think, which is when Liam was not on board yet and I started shooting middle of May.   So we’re really talking about a couple of weeks.

And that was last year?

Yes that’s right, 2008.   It all came together in no time really, which is how it should be all the time.   (laughs)

To read about your own situation, how another project had gotten delayed and you suddenly had this window, and the same with Liam Neeson, it seems the project just dropped into both your laps and you made something so striking and powerful in so short a time.   With such a tight shooting schedule, was there anything particularly challenging because of the time pressures?   [Read more...]