Russell Boyd reportedly enhanced the film's diffuse and ethereal look with the simple technique of placing a piece of bridal veil over the camera lens.
The opening lines spoken by Miranda, "What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream" are a paraphrase of lines from the poem A Dream within a Dream, by Edgar Allan Poe. The lines appear as the last two lines of each of the two verses of the poem, with a slight rearrangement in the wording.
Even though both the movie and the book it was based on claim to be inspired by real events, the story is completely fictional. Author Joan Lindsay, who wrote the novel, enjoyed the hype that her publisher created by claiming that the story was true, so she as well never decisively confirmed or denied whether her story was based on or inspired by true events or not.
Executive producer Patricia Lovell admits to being genuinely afraid of Hanging Rock. In an interview, she explained that she has only gone back to Hanging Rock once since the shooting. It was 10 years later in 1985 and Lovell said she got so frightened at the location she left almost immediately. She refuses to go back to this day.
Twelve of the schoolgirls were played by South Australians (courtesy of Adelaide's Saturday Company youth theatre group). Director Peter Weir wanted girls who were less influenced by the modern world to play the turn-of-the-century schoolgirls, and he found most of them from the more provincial Australian state of South Australia.