For me, freedom and fame are two irreconcilable concepts. Fame is, after all, its own kind of prison and my “holidays” in Lebanon had left a bad taste in my mouth about enforced incarceration. The hellholes I had inhabited with journalist John McCarthy, Terry Anderson, Tom Sutherland and Frank Reid were enough for several lifetimes. The fame that came with freedom was another kind of claustrophobia, and I flew from that with winged feet to a small cottage in the shadow of Croagh Patrick, Ireland's holiest mountain, on the west coast of Ireland .

I don't know why I turned up there, or why I remained. I remember cresting over Sheeaun hill, outside Westport in County Mayo, and being stunned by the perfectly triangular outline of the mountain, shrouded in cloud at its summit. Off to the left of it was Clare Island, bulging out of the Atlantic, cloaked in its own sea mist. It looked like an island hanging in the heavens. The abstract displacement of the panorama reverberated somewhere deep inside me. The landscape was Asian and Ethiopian. It was alien and distinctly un-Irish but something told me I was coming home. I had never been to this place before. Something signalled inside me, like a navigation light. This was my landing place.

I may have found a beautiful place to retreat to but I still remained edgy and uncomfortable. How much freedom can one really have when your friends remain captive? A memorial stone a few miles from my cottage, honouring the victims of Ireland's famine and also protesting the old apartheid system in South Africa, bore the words of Mahatma Gandhi. “How can men feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings?” Each day as I went walking it reminded me of my companions who were still in chains.

Consequently, I met with a producer to discuss my ideas about making a drama documentary about the hostage crisis. I wanted to bring to life the hideous reality that McCarthy, Anderson, Sutherland and Terry Waite continued to endure. I was not interested in a film about Islam or the Arab world. Such stereotyping was propagandist and futile. In a way, I wanted to bring these men home metaphorically into the hearts and minds of the general public.

One thing I did bring home with me from my captive years was the conviction that in the worst of all possible situations, the very best of what we are as human beings emerges. I was also anxious to reveal the “terrorists” who held us as prisoners themselves, chained to their guns, imprisoned by a worldview born of ignorance and fear, and driven by a psychotic religious zealotry that belonged in the dark ages. But the organisation behind the men who held us knew the power of television and used it to promote their cause. I, too, wanted to create my own visual exocet that would explode the easy definitions of “hostage” and “terrorist”.

In my long period of isolation I had learned how to detach from myself. I could, through this disembodied me, witness my own psychological and emotional disintegration and reintegration. Also, this detachment was a kind of freedom, through which I could record the totality of what was happening to my friends and me, like a silent cine camera. I had often said to Anderson, Sutherland and Reid (the Americans with whom I shared a cell on some occasions during my four and a half years captivity) that the excruciating routine of our daily lives might not lend itself to a book. How could one capture in words a time when nothing happened but everything happened? The great poet John Milton writes: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven.” I knew the heightened reality of such experience and felt it might be easier reclaimed in the medium of film rather than the written word.

At a second meeting a few months after our initial discussions I was introduced to John Furse, a writer with lots of experience in documentaries, and we agreed to work together on the project. But after the first few weeks sitting in my candlelit cottage and piecing together a jigsaw of significant sequences, the drama of the story seemed too poignant and universal for a campaigning documentary. Equally, I was aware that the hostage crisis was coming to an end. Thus, such a film might be redundant before it was ever made.

Furse's experience as a screen writer enabled him to see the potential in my story. I also discovered that the mind forgets nothing and that I could return psychologically, emotionally and with absolute clarity to my captivity. I was surprised myself how much of the horror, the humour, the filthy cells and the mindless violence I carried in the visual diary in my head. I had seen men sweating with terror, men sinking into comatose stupors, unable to endure another day of mind-bending oblivion. I had known tenderness and compassion from my comrades and even inept pity and sympathy from an occasional guard. Together Furse and I reworked this material into a rudimentary screenplay.

I was not prepared to do anything with Blind Flight until John McCarthy and the other men were released. It was essential that John saw and approved the work and added his own voice to it. He was released a year after me and then wanted to complete his own book before committing to the screenplay, so we both retired temporarily from Blind Flight to write our own books. Ultimately these became primary source material for the three-hander that McCarthy, Furse and myself worked on.

That was a long time ago. As L. P. Hartley famously wrote, “the past is a foreign country”. It no longer possesses me. I visit it when I choose and leave it when I will. It has been almost 14 years since my release and beyond drafting the screenplay I do not recall ever having a serious conversation about “my holidays” in Beirut, either with McCarthy or Anderson (the last man released, after seven years, whom I see occasionally and keep contact with).

What do I think of the finished product? I'm not so sure I know yet. I have seen the film twice, in cinemas in Dublin and in London, and I have seen different things in it each time. That, I suppose, is one measure of its quality. And it is a quality product. The art-movie feel is perfect. In any case, I am a big fan of European cinema. I was always insistent that actors rather than movie stars play the parts of Keenan and McCarthy. Actors know about presence and the power of silence and gesture over dialogue and narrative action. Ian Hart and Linus Roache know this intuitively.

Do I see myself in Ian Hart? I see shadows and occasional echoes. But that is as it should be. I met Ian on several occasions and from the outset told him not to try to be me. What I wanted was that he should internalise the journey of the film, absorbing the energies and the conflicts it set up, then act from his own creative energies.

The film is about transcendence, not spiritual but human. These very different men survive their terrifying ordeal by supporting and caring for each other. Their journey is a study in how two individuals merge and separate again, each taking something of the other with them. At times the characters veer towards being too black and white. Perhaps it was necessary to set up this ritual passage. Human beings are much more complex. But Furse was really up against it. A hectic shooting schedule of just five weeks, plus an overall budget that a friend of mine remarked wouldn't have covered the wardrobe for Charlie's Angels, meant that these characters could not be developed more fully.

There are scenes that had to be abandoned that would have added to the texture of the movie - those scenes set in the noise and frenzy of backstreet Beirut, and in the tranquil beauty of the Bekáa Valley . Equally, the scenes where the men try to escape would have added tension and despair. But the music, by Stephen McKeown, went a long way to compensating for the narrative drive and emotional tempo of some of the abandoned scenes. I was particularly pleased with the portrayal of the guards. The young Lebanese man playing Abed had never acted before and his performance was remarkable. I have since learned that he is in jail for trying to avoid doing national service, a curious irony. The actor playing Sayeed was so much like the realperson that he made my skin crawl.

The Lebanese actors complained that the film is too soft on the guards. Islamic Jihad, they insisted, would not be so kind. They were right, and I do not think of Islamic Jihad in kindly terms. But this misses the point. The film is not anti-Islam, nor is it political or propagandist. Politics and religion are only a way of seeing the world; they cannot define what we are as human beings. Someone wisely said that poetry might find consensus where politics cannot. Whatever its flaws or its failings, Blind Flight is poetic. It approaches some consensus about what being human is.