No Ordinary Heist is directed and co-written by Colin McIvor.
Starring Eddie Marsan and Éanna Hardwicke, the film tells the fictional story of two bank employees who find themselves caught in a chilling and high-stakes situation.
London-born Marsan, known for his roles in the biopic of Amy Winehouse, Back To Black and the 2008 film Happy Go Lucky, first read the script when he was on holiday.
“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 told 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 said.
Cork actor Hardwicke told the same programme he knew scant details about the Northern Bank robbery, before he read 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 said.
“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 film doesn’t sort of dive right into the politics of that or the fall out of that, which would be a very interesting story to tell in its own right,” Hardwicke said.
“But I think by doing that you honour the fact that this is very much a Belfast story, that so much of what happened here happened in the context of that city without, I suppose, grappling with the wider political ramifications.”