*Last year it was announced that Christian Bale’s Edgar Allen Poe-inspired thriller “The Pale Blue Eye” had been acquired by Netflix in a $55 million deal for worldwide rights.
Now the first official trailer for the Scott Cooper-directed project has been released and finds Bale playing a veteran detective who is investigating a gruesome murder at West Point Academy in 1830. The story is based on a 2003 novel by Louis Bayard.
“It was ball-freezingly cold,” Bale said about the production in an interview with EW. “There were times when we couldn’t even really talk properly ’cause our jaws were freezing up, but that’s appropriate. It looks good, it feels right. These are situations these tough characters have been accustomed to.”
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“These characters are all shaped by the environment: the cold, the snow, the barren, very gothic, unforgiving landscape, the reminder of how people lived in 1830, which is an era that you don’t often see in film,” said Cooper continues. “This felt to me like all of this environment would influence not only the viewer, consciously, subconsciously but also Poe in the journey of his origin story.”
In the film, Bale’s character, Augustus Landor, is tasked with investigating the grizzly murder of the cadet and turns to a young Edgar Allan Poe to assist him on the case.
“I thought, ‘How can I take The Pale Blue Eye and do three things?'” Cooper told EW. “How can I make this story a whodunnit, but also a father-and-son love story in Edgar Allan Poe and Augustus Landor, two loners who live on the margins of society, but also make it a Poe origin story?’ People have a strong relationship with Poe’s much later work, his incredibly dark work. I thought, ‘How can I take this novel and make this a Poe origin story so that the events that occur in these two hours motivate Poe to become the godfather of detectives and horror fiction and really set him on his life’s course?'”
Bale, who serves a producer on he project, describes his character as “a hard-boiled detective, who thinks he has nothing left to learn, and that all of his stories are behind him”
He adds, “And then discovers, to his absolute surprise, that his defining stories and defining people in his life are still ahead of him. He suffered a significant tragedy in his life, has become very skeptical of people, and meets this rather silly, performative character of Poe, who nobody really listens to or likes, but ends up being the most sincere person in Landor’s life.”
“The Pale Blue Eye” opens in select theaters starting Dec. 23 and debuts on Netflix Jan. 6.
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