Spooked

[The Paradise Conspiracy is a] compelling book, one that started out as a TV programme but which got too hot for the original medium ... a Watergate-type tale that takes the reader through possibly unlawful and certainly immoral offshore deals and what might even have been the contract killing of a crucial participant.

– The Listener on the book that inspired the film, Ian Wishart’s The Paradise Conspiracy (1995)

A New Zealand thriller is a very difficult genre because New Zealand’s not a very thrilling place. People are very critical and so they want to be convinced that what you are presenting as being thrilling is actually real, that it could happen ... We’re not given to driving around in fast cars with machine guns and bags of heroin, which is fodder for American films. We have to be a lot more inventive, careful and realistic.

– Writer/director Geoff Murphy in The Dominion Post, 4 February 2005

You can intellectualise about conspiracy theories and the CIA and the nature of multinational corporations and all that, but you don’t have a movie unless you can laugh and cry and resonate with the characters. So that’s the game that we’re in: to try and create that amalgam of emotion and meaning.

– Writer/director Geoff Murphy, in the press kit for Spooked