Tales of Mystery and Imagination

The music was the source for the visuals. Usually you make the music to fit a film. This is the other way round. Poe was obsessed with madness, death and the macabre, but the music for this [film] isn't necessarily dour. Some of it's very carnival-like.

– Geoff Murphy in The Wellingtonian, 16 July 2009

A film like the Poe thing where no one gets paid, where everybody is driven by a creative impulse, that's terrifically exciting. You're not being badgered by accountants because there's no money in it. So you have terrific freedom of expression...

– Geoff Murphy in a Radio New Zealand interview, 26 July 2009

By the time I went to them there was a complete performance already in place ... so the process was really in trying to work out how to capture it, or how to make it into some coherent thing, which was very similiar to the sort of problem one had with shooting Blerta: how do you make something coherent out of this? (laughter)

– Murphy on RNZ National