The Pale Blue Eye is a period thriller in which young Edgar Allan Poe investigates a grisly series of murders. Here stars Christian Bale, Gillian Anderson and Harry Melling explain how it’s also an origin story for the legendary horror writer.
Christian Bale previously starred in a Dark Knight origin story via Batman Begins. And thanks to new movie The Pale Blue Eye, he’s also made an Edgar Allan Poe movie that gives the author an intriguing back story.
A murder-mystery about a potential serial killer, the official Netflix synopsis for the movie is as follows: West Point, 1830. A world-weary detective is hired to discreetly investigate the gruesome murder of a cadet. Stymied by the cadets’ code of silence, he enlists one of their own to help unravel the case – a young man the world would come to know as Edgar Allan Poe.
You can read our review of The Pale Blue Eye here, and an explanation of the ending here, while below we’ve got the cast explaining how the film is an origin story for Poe himself.
Christian Bale explains why The Pale Blue Eye is an Edgar Allan Poe origin story
“It’s a look at how did this incredible godfather of the detective story of the macabre become who he became” explains Bale, who plays the detective in question.
“That’s what Louis Bayard wrote The Pale Blue Eye the book for – to try to figure out this incredibly enigmatic man who died under mysterious circumstances, who was such a trailblazer in literature. How did he become that man?”
Harry Potter star Harry Melling plays Poe, and says he is trying to do something unexpected with the horror legend.
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On preparing for the role, Melling explains: “A lot of that work is research, pretty much, to begin with, certainly. Just reading as much as I can about him. And then returning to the script and working out what’s useful and what isn’t. And very much working within that script.”
Regarding his version of the character, Melling adds: “He feels like a different Poe maybe to what people might expect – which was useful to me, because it allowed me certain freedoms in terms of playing with a silliness that people maybe weren’t expecting. Or maybe a fun that people weren’t expecting. But eventually ending up in a place where we go ‘Ah, I see now those seeds have been planted. I see where the icon Edgar Allan Poe comes from.’ So it was a fun journey of just piecing everything together.”
Gillian Anderson on how this story influences Poe
When asked about The Pale Blue Eye as an origin story, Gillian Anderson – who plays Julia Marquis in the movie – says: “I think that was the intention, in a sense, by both the author of the novel, and also [director] Scott [Cooper] being fascinated by Poe and this time period, and what would someone like Poe – who is ultimately an artist and a poet – how would he handle being in the middle of West Point for the seven months or whatever that he spent there, living that rigidity and being almost the antithesis of what you’d imagine some of the West Point cadets would be. What their whole ethos is.”
She continued, “The juxtaposition of putting Poe into that setting and how that might have influenced his writing and his persona and who he was and who he became – it’s fascinating to look at it that way.”
The Pale Blue Eye is streaming on Netflix now.
