‘The Pale Blue Eye’s’ Christian Bale and Scott Cooper on Building Edgar Allan Poe’s Fictional Origin Story
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To channel the role of veteran detective Augustus Landor in “The Pale Blue Eye,” Christian Bale researched the works of famed hard-boiled detective and mystery novelists, particularly “The Maltese Falcon” author Dashiell Hammett.
However, there were moments during Bale’s creative process where he felt that his research “was useless.”
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“You know, you do a lot of research which ends up pointing to nothing, but then you’ll suddenly find a scene where you’re bringing forth something from the back of your mind that is helpful,” Bale told Variety at the premiere of “The Pale Blue Eye” on Wednesday night. “I do tend to come to the conclusion that nothing is wasted time and there’s always a sense of life off camera, so I don’t feel like anything is too small of a detail to consider.”
Based on Louis Bayard’s novel of the same name, the mystery film introduces Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling) as a young cadet at the United States Military Academy in 1830s upstate New York. When Landor is called to investigate a series of murders at the academy, he enlists Poe to help him solve the case. Therefore, Bale turned to the writer’s short stories for more inspiration.
“Looking at Poe’s work where we see that detective stuff — ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Purloined Letter’ and ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ — and just having an idea of creating this origin story of, who was it? Who was his primary influence in becoming this whiskey bent, hellbound godfather of the macabre and detective stories?” he continued. “Let’s make it Landor.”
“The Pale Blue Eye” marks Bale’s third collaboration with director-writer Scott Cooper, with whom he worked on 2013’s “Out of the Furnace” and 2017’s “Hostiles.” On the carpet, Cooper recalled his fascination with Poe’s “dark world” at a young age.
“I spent my formative years and grew up in the state of Virginia, which is where Poe spent his formative years. My father taught English and literature, and there was a lot of Poe in my house,” Cooper explained. “And then my father introduced me to Louis Bayard’s novel, ‘The Pale Blue Eye,’ just to read for pleasure. I thought, this is gonna make for an incredible film.”
In particular, he was drawn to the opportunity to “upend people’s idea about who Poe was.” “We know him as the author of ‘The Raven,’ the man who bequeathed to us detective fiction and Gothic horror. But when he was at West Point as a young man, he was warm and witty and humorous, and thrown to poetic and romantic musings. Also someone that was rather ruthless because he was an orphan, and he was always looking for a connection. So all of that courses through the film.”
On finding his ideal Poe, Cooper revealed that “Harry Potter” alum Melling was always his initial choice. “It’s been several years that I’ve wanted Harry to play him, and he just didn’t know it. When I saw him in ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,’ I knew that was my Edgar Allan Poe,” he said. “Luckily, he was available, he read the screenplay and he loved it. He auditioned for me, and I sent the audition to Christian and Christian said, ‘Why look any further?'”
“The Pale Blue Eye” premieres in select theaters Dec. 23 and starts streaming Jan. 6 on Netflix.
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