Not far from here, Lee stayed with his old friend Jane Campion as they wrote the script for Top of the Lake, Campion's first television production in more than 20 years. Using Campion's hut as a base, they walked through the mountains, over the paddocks and explored the deep, mossy forests.

For Campion, the celebrated director of films including The Piano and Bright Star, there is something almost sacred about this place. ''When I go into that bush, I feel like I'm in the most beautiful living room in the world,'' she says. ''I just loll around on the moss. I find this a very healing environment … It's like your energy knows how to sink into it.'' Many others have felt the same. Visitors have sought solace in Paradise since the house was built as a rural retreat in the 1880s. But Lee says there are stories of people coming to grief here; dreamers going mad and adventurers getting lost in the wild. Campion calls it ''a place where great hopes were built and dashed''.

''I just don't believe that paradise exists; it's a mental concept,'' she says. ''I'm very interested in the stories that you get when you explore the drive or the desire for paradise, and the impossibility of it.''

In Top of the Lake, Paradise is contested territory. A tribe of broken, disillusioned older women have set up camp, seeking answers and happiness from an enigmatic guru. Holly Hunter plays the guru, working with Campion for the first time since she starred in The Piano in 1993. Peter Mullan is the local drug lord, Matt Mitcham, a hard man determined to possess Paradise and drive the women away.

At the heart of the story is a mystery. Mitcham's 12-year-old daughter, Tui (Jacqueline Joe), is pregnant and will not reveal the father's name. When she disappears, a young detective from Sydney (played by Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss with a passable Australian accent) becomes obsessed with the search.

When Mullan first read the script, he thought of Twin Peaks, David Lynch's 1990s television series that blended a gruesome murder and small-town politics with a deep, unsettling vein of surrealism.

''It's kind of otherworldly,'' Mullan says. ''And yet it doesn't feel consciously surreal … The whodunit genre - or any genre - is only of interest when you pervert it. The simple hook is the question mark that runs through the story.

''If that's strong enough, you can go off anywhere you like and [Campion] does go off in all sorts of directions. But, quite cleverly, we always come back to whodunit.''

Mullan is talking during a break from filming in the lakeside town of Glenorchy, about 20 kilometres from Paradise. There is not much more to the town than a pub and some stores that sell merino knitwear to tourists. Mullan is still in costume. Scruffy fur peeps through the battered seams of his possum-skin jacket.

He says Top of the Lake feels different to some of the other television shows he has worked on. When he appeared in the Scottish detective show Taggart, he was shocked at the frantic pace and what he saw as a cavalier attitude to quality. ''It was like they didn't care … because it made them lots and lots of money,'' he says.

''[Top of the Lake] feels like a film set. It never feels rushed.''

Television, Campion says, has become a forum for complex, nuanced storytelling. She loves dense, clever dramas such as the American western Deadwood, and found the idea of spreading a story over six hour-long episodes irresistible. The executive producers, Australian Emile Sherman and Britain's Iain Canning, had experience in film, most notably with Oscar winner The King's Speech. Campion recruited Australian director Garth Davis to share the workload.

In film, she says, there is sometimes pressure to make conservative choices to attract audiences. ''Whereas in television, you can be edgy. It felt like it was a great area for me to go, to try and get a bit more freedom, to tell stories that are at my limit,'' she says. ''The invitation is to be challenging and to be explorative.''

This approach is risky. Partway through filming, Mullan is not sure how Top of the Lake will turn out, although he is enjoying ''all that Campion-esque, wonderful, slightly off-centre weirdness''.

''I think this is one of those ones that'll either be brilliant or it'll be shit,'' he says.

Has he told Campion this? ''Yeah, I did. I don't think this is the kind of thing that'll be just OK … It's brave, seriously brave, and if it works, people will get a big buzz out of it. If it doesn't, you hold your head up and you tried your best … This one's got no safety net at all.''

BBC wins, as actor swears he thought it was Aunty

Jane Campion imagined an Australian would play Robin Griffin, the detective who returns home to New Zealand from Sydney to be drawn into the mystery of a missing child. Then she saw Elisabeth Moss' audition. The American actor best known as Peggy Olson, secretary-turned-copywriter in Mad Men, had a ''Mona Lisa quality'', Campion says. ''She holds you and she's mysterious.''

The ABC committed to part-funding the series but pulled out when Moss was cast, citing a wish to see an Australian in the lead. Pay TV channel UKTV stepped in and will broadcast the Australian premiere. In Britain, it will screen on BBC Two. Campion was ''disappointed for the ABC viewers''. ''But I think [the ABC] has to play a pretty safe political line … You don't do these projects to end up being compromised if you don't need to be. Our job is to do the best for the story.''

The change caused some confusion for Scottish actor Peter Mullan, who plays the villain. In 2009, he joined a protest against the BBC's refusal to screen a charity appeal for Gaza. He swore he would never work for the BBC again, and when he signed on he believed - wrongly - that Top of the Lake was supported entirely by Australian funds. The BBC was already involved.

''I can't believe this is BBC money,'' he says. ''I said I'd never work for them again. I f---ed on that one totally. I'm sure when the program comes out, journalists will quite rightly eat me for breakfast. Fair play. I made the statement and if you're going to do that, you need to see it through.''

Top of the Lake begins on Sunday, March 24, at 8.30pm on UKTV.