Christian Bale unearths an Edgar Allan Poe origin story in The Pale Blue Eye trailer
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Filmmaker Scott Cooper considers atmosphere on par with character. The small-town southwest of America in Crazy Heart. The Pennsylvania steel mills in Out of the Furnace. Whitey Bulgar's South Boston hood in Black Mass. The rural Americana backdrop in Hostiles. "We are all influenced by our surroundings, our atmosphere, the environments in which we live," Cooper tells EW. He took the same approach for The Pale Blue Eye.
The new trailer, which EW can exclusively reveal, showcases more of the bone-dry, unforgiving winter that encases Christian Bale's grumpy detective Augustus Landor and Harry Melling's pre-poet Edgar Allan Poe.
"It was ball-freezingly cold," Bale confirms of the production. "There were times when we couldn't even really talk properly 'cause our jaws were freezing up, but that's appropriate. It looks good, it feels right. These are situations these tough characters have been accustomed to."
"These characters are all shaped by the environment: the cold, the snow, the barren, very gothic, unforgiving landscape, the reminder of how people lived in 1830, which is an era that you don't often see in film," Cooper continues. "This felt to me like all of this environment would influence not only the viewer, consciously, subconsciously but also Poe in the journey of his origin story."
The Pale Blue Eye, based on the historical fiction novel by author Louis Bayard, begins with the unsettling death of a cadet at West Point military academy in upstate New York in 1830. The recruit is found hanging by his neck from a tree one foggy morning, but upon examination, it's uncovered that someone surgically skilled cut out his heart.
Landor, a grizzled local detective with a solid track record, has been asked to investigate the murder discreetly before more bodies start piling up. To assist in this case, he turns to a rather unique cadet to be his scout within the walls of the institution, a young Edgar Allan Poe.
"I thought, 'How can I take The Pale Blue Eye and do three things?'" Cooper says. "How can I make this story a whodunnit, but also a father-and-son love story in Edgar Allan Poe and Augustus Landor, two loners who live on the margins of society, but also make it a Poe origin story?' People have a strong relationship with Poe's much later work, his incredibly dark work. I thought, 'How can I take this novel and make this a Poe origin story so that the events that occur in these two hours motivate Poe to become the godfather of detectives and horror fiction and really set him on his life's course?'"
SCOTT GARFIELD/NETFLIX Christian Bale's Det. Landor is on the case in 'The Pale Blue Eye.'
Cooper began developing The Pale Blue Eye as a film shortly after finishing Crazy Heart, but it would "lay fallow" for a decade while his friendship with Bale, who starred in Out of the Furnace and Hostiles, deepened.
"I'm a sloth. He's a cheetah," Bale says of Cooper. "He writes so quickly, and he wants to work all the time. I take a long time to read anything, and I never want to work if I can avoid it."
As the years went back, Bale started growing into a more mature look that fit the vibe Cooper was searching for in Landor. What was that vibe? "A grumpy old bastard who wants nothing to do with people," the actor says with a laugh.
"He's a hard-oiled detective, who thinks he has nothing left to learn, and that all of his stories are behind him," he adds on a more serious note. "And then discovers, to his absolute surprise, that his defining stories and defining people in his life are still ahead of him. He suffered a significant tragedy in his life, has become very skeptical of people, and meets this rather silly, performative character of Poe, who nobody really listens to or likes, but ends up being the most sincere person in Landor's life."
The mystery-thriller also marks a rare project that counts Bale as a producer. The Oscar winner says that's a testament to his friendship with Cooper. "I felt like I was his creative right-hand man in regard to understanding his vision and in helping to achieve that," he notes, adding, "It doesn't mean it's something I'm gonna continue to do."
SCOTT GARFIELD/NETFLIX Lucy Boynton's Lea Marquis sits at the piano in a scene from 'The Pale Blue Eye.'
With a cast of characters that includes Lucy Boynton's epileptic Lea Marquis, Timothy Spall's Col. Sylvanus Thayer, Toby Jones' Dr. Daniel Marquis, Gillian Anderson's flirtatious Julia Marquis, Harry Lawtey's cadet Artemus Marquis, and Fred Hechinger's entitled, the culprit at the center of this mystery could be anyone.
"With enough patience, a suspect will often interrogate himself," Bale's Landor instructs Melling's Poe in the trailer footage. That line was not in the original novel, but it is the crux of Cooper's The Pale Blue Eye.
"This is a man who is known for what we call loveless interrogation, who has an ability to elicit responses from people in ways that others cannot," the director explains. "He says that in kind of an offhanded way, but it really speaks to not only his ability as a legendary constable and detective but also as it relates to Poe and the conclusion of our narrative and what Poe would later write."
The Pale Blue Eye opens in select theaters starting Dec. 23 and drops on Netflix Jan. 6.
Related content:
