Edgar Allan Poe is widely credited with inventing the detective story, so it’s fitting that he’s now a character in his very own murder mystery. The Pale Blue Eye, written and directed by Scott Cooper, follows Poe (Harry Melling) as a young West Point cadet who finds himself drawn into a gruesome murder investigation alongside storied detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale). Along the way, the young poet dives deep into the darkness of the human soul — which is, let’s say, not bad material for his future career.
For Cooper, the work of Edgar Allan Poe has been a lifelong passion, spurred by his father. “Because my father taught English and there was lots of literature strewn about our house, Poe came into my world at a young age, and I was just fascinated with his works,” Cooper tells Tudum. “And my father, after I directed Crazy Heart, he said, ‘There’s a novel that you should read; it’s The Pale Blue Eye and it has Edgar Allan Poe as a character at the center of an investigation.’”
The connection between Poe and the genre itself made Louis Bayard’s fictional story irresistible to Cooper. “It allowed me to do three things: make a film that’s a whodunit; [tell] a father-and-son love story — a kinship between two men who are loners, who live on the margins of society; and then of course, this could serve as a Poe origin story,” he says.
The Pale Blue Eye is a fictional tale, but Cooper considers it a hypothetical journey for the iconic writer, from young amateur to titanic literary figure. “Of course this is a work of fiction, although Poe was at West Point,” says Cooper. “What I’m saying is that it’s these events that occur in our film that shaped his worldview and helped him become the writer that he became — with the recurring themes that deal with the questions of death and the effects of decomposition and reanimation of the dead and mourning; all those are considered part of his dark romanticism.”
A writer himself, Cooper has his own particular recurring theme: casting Christian Bale. Cooper started writing The Pale Blue Eye a decade ago, but he’s glad he took his time for Bale’s sake. “At the time that I was writing it, Christian Bale, who’s my closest pal and collaborator, would have been too young to play the aging and retired Constable Augustus Landor,” Cooper says. “And now he’s the perfect age.” (Cooper and Bale previously worked together on Out of the Furnace and Hostiles; their third collaboration brought them even closer together.)
“It’s a seamless working relationship,” says Cooper. “We do a lot of what I call investigative text work where we really spend a great deal of time with the script and we talk about motivation. So by the time we actually get to the set and we’re shooting, both of us know exactly what it is that we’re striving for.”
As part of that intense preparation, Cooper also reread a few of his favorite Poe works. Anything he might recommend for a Poe neophyte getting ready to stare into The Pale Blue Eye? “One of my favorites is ‘The Premature Burial,’ which is a horror short story that he published in the mid-1840s, where the main character is expressing his concern about being buried alive, something that very often concerned Poe,” Cooper says. How’s that for some light required reading?
The Pale Blue Eye opens in select theaters in December; its gaze hits Netflix on Jan. 6.
