Edgar Allan Poe is widely considered the father of American horror, detective and thriller with his macabre blend of blood and mystery. Almost a hundred years after Poe’s birth in 1809, Louis Bayard wrote his novel The Pale Blue Eye about a young military cadet at west Point Academy called Poe helping to solve a murder. Hot on the heels of his Oscar win for Crazy Heart in 2010, writer/ director Scott Cooper began working in his adaptation of Bayard’s novel. Over a decade later, his vision is finally bared on the screen. He spoke to Creative Screenwriting Magazine about his journey.
“Much like Edgar Allan Poe’s formative years, I spent my formative years in Virginia. Poe’s parents died when he was very young and was adopted by John Allen in Virginia who raised him,” continued Cooper. “My father taught English at the University Of Virginia where Poe was once a student.” Cooper Senior was taught by novelist William Faulkner, so it was inevitable that Scott would fall in love with the literary form.
After the breathtaking success of Crazy Heart, Scott’s father introduced him to The Pale Blue Eye novel which placed a young Poe at the center of a detective story. “Then I read Bayard’s sharply observed narrative and decided it would make an interesting film.”
Ode To Edgar Allen Poe
Scott Cooper. Photo by Mark Seliger
Edgar Allen Poe is widely regarded as the unhinged, obsessed, hard-drinking author who wrote The Raven. Like much hearsay, there is truth to this, but it’s only part of his story. Poe died under mysterious circumstances in Baltimore after a botched suicide attempt. “People understood this man was incredibly troubled. I did not want to make that story,” stated Cooper. Despite his self-destructiveness, Poe was acutely observant of the dark crevices of humanity. He sensed the undercurrents of a situation where others didn’t. His mind was working in overdrive as he staked out his environment to make sense of it.
The writer/director chose to portray Poe as an instrumental part of a whodunit story that he’s most known for. It would also be a father-son love story between Augustus Andor (Christian Bale) and Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling). Both live on the margins of society. Both want to solve a murder mystery.
Scott Cooper’s main goal was to focus on Poe’s origin story. “I wanted to explore who Edgar Allen Poe was before he became the writer he became,” he articulated. “He was the master of the macabre, obsessed with the satanic and the occult, love and death, premature burial rituals, suffering, anguish, anxiety and paranoia.” But Poe had a childish playful side to him many chose to ignore.
Tonally, Poe’s narratives were in stark contrast to Cooper’s research of him as a person. “By all accounts, he was a wonderful companion, incredibly humorous, witty, and fun to be around. He frequently quoted Shakespeare and Byron. He was a lovely, warm southerly gentleman.”
A Notable Time And Place
The Pale Blue Eye is set in 1830, a distinct era of American culture. It was around the time of the Revolutionary War and Civil Era. Because there was little else known about this era outside these events, Cooper could exercise his creative chops and take it wherever he wanted. “I wanted it to feel Gothic and dark… a world with questions with no answers. Many people were informed by art.” There were limits on how much science could explain, which allowed Poe to pursue his love of the supernatural and the occult.
“It was a time when America was drinking alcohol the most, and Poe expressed himself best in the darkness especially during the winter months. This lent itself to a grim or ghastly atmosphere and observing the smallest details.” Edgar Allen Poe influenced Lovecraft, Stephen King and countless other horror writers.
It was also a time when church and science were at ideological loggerheads with each other. Scientific reasoning could easily be dismissed by the formidable power of faith. “It was a time when many people believed in superstition and witchcraft. There was also the growth of professional policing which prosecuted these practises.”
I explored the dark clouds of society that conveyed an unsettling, ominous quality that would inform Poe’s work.
Who’s Story Is It?
Landor and Poe act as dual protagonists as part of a father-son story. “It’s almost a love story where Augustus Landor and Edgar Allen Poe slowly uncover each other’s secrets. They ultimately solved far more mysteries than we knew existed.” Neither man is who they initially appear to be. The Pale Blue Eye begins as a simple police procedural, gently sprinkling unique clues as the story progresses.
There’s a regimented, gloomy world of West Point, a legendary constable (Landor) who’s been asked to discreetly investigate a grisly murder. “You have these two men living on the margins of society, but drawn to one another.” As their investigations continued, “Landor sees Poe as being a keen observer and they become very close.”
Both Edgar Allen Poe and Augustus Landor have suffered tragedy and loss – his wife has passed and his daughter has mysteriously disappeared. Poe was orphaned at a young age. “As a romantic and a poet, Poe’s something of an outcast in a rigid environment.” He didn’t bother to seek acceptance. Poe even nudged his way into the eccentric Marquis house and falls in love with their daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton). Poe’s tender, romantic flourishes are evident in many of his works.
Lucy Boynton (Lea Marquis) and Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling) Scott Garfield/ Netflix Photo by
Landor and Poe are indeed a very odd and unlikely couple. “Poe is a callow romantic, while Landor is more prosaic, perceptive, and wryly humorous.” In a tale where everyone exists wearing an invisible veil, Landor and Poe harmonize in a fragile place of truth and sincerity. Ironically, in the end, everyone is ultimately who they appear to be. Landor has curdled under the tragedies he’s faced during his life, so he’s attracted to the gentleness of Poe who seems to roll with the punches without bitterness. “Landor almost wishes that Poe was part of his family.”
Who Is Scott Cooper?
The human psyche is the main thing that drives Scott Cooper to write. “What motivates people in their lives? What is secretive and not revealed? We all have a public life, a private life, and a secret life.” Cooper doesn’t write what a character is thinking or feeling. “You have to show this through visual choices, behavior, actions and dialogue,” he quipped. Since The Pale Blue Eye is dialogue heavy, Cooper is acutely aware of “not obscuring character with dialogue and action. Character drives everything.”
At its heart, The Pale Blue Eye isn’t just a detective story. It’s a story of death and love. “It explores relationships. Where life ends and death begins.” He looks at the rigors of military life and the mysteries of the Hudson Valley in Upstate New York. “It’s layered with themes of regret, revenge, solitude, and anguish and how these drive these characters to slowly reveal parts of themselves we otherwise wouldn’t see… themes of lost love.”
On a more ethereal plane, the film seeks to control chaos by making the unknown known, and the ephemeral nature of fate in bringing Landor and Poe together.
Louis Bayard’s novel is epic and sprawling in its nature, so time-restricting choices needed to be made with respect to its adaptation. “The Pale Blue Eye could have easily been a limited series based on Bayard’s world alone. “There were many characters that I didn’t introduce.” Scott Cooper wrote over twenty drafts to finesse the magnitude of the story into a two-hour film. “The early drafts were much longer. I had ten or twelve main characters which I cut back to around eight.”
His creative process can be summarized as writing, rewriting, and polishing. “Many people say the first five minutes of the film and the last ten are the most important.”
As he “shrink-wrapped” the story, he realized that certain tertiary characters couldn’t exist in the film. He reduced the character scope to the five most important aspects of their characters, the major core elements of why and how something occurs, two key scenes that you can’t lose, and chose the ten to twenty favorite lines of dialogue that drive the plot and character plot and major over-arching themes. “That’s the process to bring down a one-hundred and fifty page screenplay into one that’s an actionable one-hundred and twenty.” Scott Cooper then invites feedback from both professional and unprofessional readers. They might request more backstory for Poe, for instance, or the removal of an unnecessary scene of Poe in class with his French professor.
The adaptation of Bayard’s novel involved more than eliminating extraneous material. It was about capturing the intent of the story. “It’s about leaving breadcrumbs, so that when someone finishes the film and the crucial denouement is revealed, we could seen it as evident all along.” These breadcrumbs become more apparent in the second viewing of the film.
Poe says to Landor in a tavern, “I will one day write a poem that will some day send your name down through the ages.” It shows how much he’s grown to love Landor.
“If you give a suspect enough time, he will often interrogate himself,” said Landor. “In time, the evidence will reveal itself,” he added to highlight his immense patience.
“Unremarkable men and women who are put into remarkable circumstances in the search for the truth,” is the essence of Scott Cooper’s voice. “A film exists somewhere between what is dreamt and what is possible.“
