Christian Bale on How The Pale Blue Eye Crafts an Origin Story for Edgar Allan Poe
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The post Christian Bale on How The Pale Blue Eye Crafts an Origin Story for Edgar Allan Poe appeared first on Consequence.
In recent times, films and TV shows have found rich territory in exploring how iconic figures arrived at their iconic status, from countless superheroes to Whitney Houston to Saul Goodman. Add Edgar Allan Poe to those ranks, thanks to The Pale Blue Eye, as the new Netflix thriller reveals what the famed author might have been like before becoming “that whiskey bent and hell bound godfather of the macabre,” as star Christian Bale (with an assist from Hank Williams) tells Consequence.
Written and directed by Scott Cooper, this adaptation of Louis Bayard’s novel stars Bale as Augustus Landor, a detective summoned to the military academy at West Point, New York to investigate a mysterious death that spirals into additional instances of murder. Landor’s primary ally in the investigation is a young student at the academy named Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling), who proves most helpful in exploring how, and why, these young men found themselves with their hearts ripped out.
It’s a cause of death worthy of the dark fiction the real-life Poe would go on to write. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and for Poe, you know, the cemetery is a beautiful place,” Bale says. “He doesn’t want to look at trees with leaves on — he wants to see them in the dead of winter. He has a very strong personality and a strong viewpoint on art and beauty and it’s wonderful. And Harry plays him fantastically.”
Melling, best known for The Queen’s Gambit, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and the Harry Potter films, relished the opportunity to explore the writer as a young man. “There’s so much information about Poe, but being able to invent these things — that maybe he was charming, maybe he was a bit foolish, maybe he was witty and stupid all at the same time… All these little things offer him a bit more range to the Poe that we think we know now, as this more sinister, dark gloomier person,” he says. “I think that territory’s a fascinating one, to reinvent this idea of who this Edgar Allen Poe is.”
“We are very entrenched in knowing Poe much later in his life, where he was known to be prone to drink, where he ended up dying under mysterious circumstances in a Baltimore alley,” Cooper says. “Here in this film we find a Poe who is warm and witty and humorous and a great companion and quite sincere. So that doesn’t quite equate with whom most people think when they think of Edgar Allen Poe.”
That was essential, though, “because this is essentially a Poe origin story, and one can’t really start with Poe already living in the darkness that we know him, because then of course there’s no place for him to evolve to or to grow into. So that was really the key for me, is finding Poe in these formative years when he was kind of a southern gentleman, and that the events that take place in this movie affect him so deeply and richly that he could only then write The Premature Burial and The Telltale Heart and Murder in the Rue Morgue and The Raven and everything that people know him for.”
“To see him brought to life with such humility and a sense of humor was really moving,” says Lucy Boynton, who plays Lea, a young woman who grows close with Poe during the investigation. “And I think it brings so much humanity to the person who has become more of a kind of an entity.”
This is Cooper’s third film starring Bale, following Out of the Furnace and Hostiles, a collaboration that comes from a very personal place. “We have an incredibly close working relationship and we have a deep friendship outside of the film business,” Cooper says. “Christian is my closest pal. He’s my closest collaborator. I spend a lot of time with him off the set. So I then am able to write for a Christian Bale that not many people get to see. So if you see Christian in my friend David O. Russell’s movies — they’ve done three together — or if you see him in Adam McKay’s films or Chris Nolan’s, we all utilize Christian in different ways. That speaks to his facility and his broad range as an actor. But I like to write for a very deep and rich and personal interior life of his that not many people get to see. And I take great pride in our friendship and also in our working relationship.”
Cooper says that exploring the youth of Poe required blending beauty with the macabre, “because his writing is quite beautiful, but also quite, quite dark. And you think about that from a thematic level, you think about that from an aesthetic level. Because I’m making a film about Edgar Allen Poe as a student, well before he’s formed his worldview as a writer and as a poet, the events that take place in this film as a Poe origin story are kind of motivating him to become the writer that he ultimately became.”
While Poe is still just a young officer-in-training in the film, qualities of his later prose are reflected in the film’s making: While set in “a very sort of rich, detailed, Gothic world,” Melling says, “the thriller element really rattles through the film. It really gives the film a pulse. And I thought that combination of both those things was quite brilliant, and very in keeping with Edgar Poe’s writing. His poetry was very taut — you think about The Raven, where all the couplets are very tight, but yet there was this wonderful, rich world living alongside it. Hopefully, we’ve managed to somehow infuse that into the movie.”
The Pale Blue Eye (Netflix)
To do so, Cooper not only approached The Pale Blue Eye as a period piece, but as a reflection of that particular aesthetic. This meant, he says, “shooting at a time in which the landscape was much more barren and unforgiving and brutal. There were no leaves on the trees, a wintry landscape, harsh winds, lots of fog, all of those sorts of things. That makes for very difficult shooting conditions, but we knew that we were serving Poe’s world.”
He also points out that “so often when I watch period pictures, most of the time I see actors in dress-up and I see too many of the period trappings, too many of the period details in the forefront. And I know I’m watching a movie and I want all of that to recede. I want all of the movie-making artifice to disappear so that we’re completely focused on story, character, and atmosphere.”
When it comes to projects set in the past, Bale observes that there’s quirks to the format “I think some people naturally have faces that can belong in a period piece, in certain periods, and some people have faces that don’t belong in that, and that’s quite intriguing.”
Also, Bale adds, “I know that Scott very much wanted to hear the different actors speak in the language, because that’s often a telltale thing, of someone’s vernacular just being way too modern. Just the tone of it — ah, man, it just sounds modern. But I can’t say I dwell on it particularly. You don’t want to get sucked into making it unrelatable because it’s period, you know. My viewpoint is that people are people then and now. The superficial differences change, but the essence remains the same.”
The Pale Blue Eye is in theaters now, and begins streaming on Netflix starting January 6th.
Christian Bale on How The Pale Blue Eye Crafts an Origin Story for Edgar Allan Poe
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