The making of Tickets started with a conversation between director Abbas Kiarostami and producers Carlo Cresto-Dina and Babak Karimi. Kiarostami suggested the idea of a trilogy of feature-length documentaries to be directed by three different directors. When asked to name the directors he would have liked to have on board, he immediately mentioned Ermanno Olmi and Ken Loach. A fax was sent to the two masters who both immediately replied with an almost identical phone call: 'I am in! The three of us can make tremendous work together'.

The story was conceived in sequence by Ermanno Olmi (who first came up with a story of an old scientist on a train), Abbas Kiarostami (who picked up some of Olmi's characters and continued the plot) and finally Ken Loach (who, with writer Paul Laverty, introduced new characters and stories but at the same time concluded Olmi's initial plot). The film is all set on a train, travelling from central Europe to Rome. Stories and characters will interweave like casual encounters on a second class intercity train. Some of the sequences were jointly directed by the three together.

The editing then gelled together the stories in a single storyline.

The form of the text that the Italian pharmacologist is writing on his laptop is inconsistent between the close-up shots and the longer-distance ones: the laptop is a Windows machine, and the longer-distance show the Windows operating system, but the close-ups are of the modern Macintosh operating system.