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The new Hallmark Movies & Mysteries film, “Five More Minutes,” was inspired by a true story. Although the characters themselves aren’t lifted from real events, a real-life story and song did inspire the idea behind the movie.
A Song Based on a Real-Life Loss Inspired the Movie
According to Hallmark’s synopsis, the movie was indeed inspired by a song. The synopsis reads: “Inspired by Scotty McCreery’s song, ‘Five More Minutes,’ a woman’s Christmas wish is answered in unexpected ways when her late grandfather’s journal turns up and reveals an untold romance.”
You can watch McCreery’s music video for “Five More Minutes” below.
The song is about wanting five more minutes for all those special moments in life, knowing how fast time goes by. Here’s the chorus:
Time rolls by, the clock don’t stop
I wish I had a few more drops
Of the good stuff, the good times
Oh, but they just keep on flyin’
Right on by, like it ain’t nothin’
I wish I had me a, a pause button
Moments like those, Lord knows I’d hit it
And give myself five more minutes
His last verse talks about his grandfather dying at 86 and how he prayed that God would give him just five more minutes with his grandpa.
McCreery told The Boot that he wrote the lyrics to his song with Frank Rogers and Monty Criswell not long after his grandfather died in 2015. The song was officially released as a single in May 2017.
He told The Boot:
I was just kind of talking to him [Rogers] about Grandaddy, and [how] there were a few things I wanted to tell Grandaddy that I didn’t get a chance to. I was kind of reminiscing on what we’d do together: We’d golf together and swim together in his pool in the backyard. Monty was the one who had the idea that you just wish you have five more minutes with them; he had the idea for the song, and I said, yeah, man, that’s the title. We wrote the song around that — tried to make it pretty autobiographical and pretty relatable to the folks out there.
The song is a tribute to his grandfather, Bill McCreery, News Observer reported. Scott McCreery self-released the song without a record label’s backing after he was dropped from Mercury Nashville in 2016. He later signed with Triple Tiger Records after the song did so well.
This is where the song and the movie overlap. DeLoach’s character, Clara, loses her grandfather in the movie and is facing her first Christmas without him, QC Life reported. She wishes fervently for just five more minutes with him, just like McCreery had wished after his own grandfather died.
Nikki DeLoach Said the Movie Helped Her Find Hope in Her Own Grief
DeLoach told QC in an interview that this movie is about finding hope inside of loss and grief.
“I lost my dad in July,” DeLoach said. “I knew this movie was going to be really hard for me to do. But I also knew that it could be something that I could do to honor my father. And maybe I could find a little hope myself inside of it, which I did. … It’s a tribute to my dad and to everyone out there who’s lost someone. And the only thing that you want is just five more minutes with that person, and how you get that five more minutes.”
She said about the song: “I really thought it was such a cool idea, to take a song — especially a song like that, that’s so meaningful and so specific — I just love the fact that Scotty took his pain and put it somewhere. It’s kind of the same thing that I wanted to do making the movie, was to take this pain of mine and to have this space to be able to place it…”
In an Instagram post, DeLoach wrote: “In the depths of my own grief over the loss of my dad, God brought me this story, this character. And I was reminded, yet again, that I’m being carried and held. If writing a song could help Scotty feel closer to his grandfather every time he performed it, maybe this movie could help me feel like my dad is never far away too. What I wouldn’t give for 5 more minutes with my dad. What we all wouldn’t give for 5 more minutes with our beloveds who we’ve lost.”
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