Scott Cooper talks about the experience of bringing 'The Pale Blue Eye' to screen

Scott Cooper shares his experience working on Louis Bayard’s adaptation of The Pale Blue Eye.

The movie starts out with a really strange crime. A West Point cadet is discovered dead in 1830. The cadet’s heart is expertly removed and taken after being taken to the mortuary. August Landor, played by Christian Bale, a local investigator, is hired to look into the case in an effort to determine who is responsible for this brutality. Harry Melling plays a young Edgar Allan Poe, who Landor turns to for assistance when he has trouble getting information from the other cadets.

Cooper shares his experience with bringing the story on screen. He says, “Writing specifically for actors whom I have cast. I generally write with actors in mind. I wrote Crazy Heart for Jeff Bridges. I wrote Out of the Furnace and Hostiles for Christian. And then once you find your Edgar Allan Poe and you find your Captain Hitchcock and Superintendent Thayer and the rest of the cast, and when Gillian Anderson comes on, you tend to have to tailor them. So the outline was the same. It’s all been about characterization.”

While giving an interview with Collider, Cooper emphasized the importance of the character’s theme. He said, “I would say Poe changed the most only because we have very entrenched ideas about who Edgar Allan Poe was. And that’s from later in life when he died under mysterious circumstances in Baltimore and was prone to alcoholism, and it left us the creator of detectives in horror fiction. But this is about who he was before. So it was really about understanding Harry’s tone, his performance, trying to find somebody who’s warm and humorous and witty and prone to romantic and poetic musings, and then having Harry express that and bring that to life.”