“I did a lot [of research] actually. One of the really good Poe books was written by an Englishman called Peter Ackroyd, it’s called Poe: A Life Cut Short. That was the kind of go-to book for the film; I gave it to all the actors. They all read that.

“I had a large compendium of Poe stories and in the back of that is a lot of his letters which are really fantastic. It shows you a great insight to the way his mind worked, like the troubled relationship he had with his adoptive father, and what he wrote to his mother. So, yeah, there was a bunch of research.”