Harry, you mention Poe had some words to say. I was excited to see you deliver them, given that your performance in “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” was phenomenal.
Cooper: [interjecting] Oh, a remarkable performance!
You performed these iconic texts for the Coens — Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Shakespeare, the Gettysburg Address— and your performances of each reflect not only the character’s emotional journey but the film’s broader ideas about the decline of value in the arts and exploitation of artists. Tell me about developing emotion and theme through heightened oration.
Melling: Thank you. That’s so very kind. It all starts from the script, really. That’s where I begin. Obviously, playing an icon like Edgar Allan Poe, there’s certain baggage that Scott and I discussed. I wanted to read as much as I could, both books about him and also his own works, to understand if that mythology of him was true. And much like Scott said, I don’t think a lot of it is true. There’s a lot of detail lost in the mythology of him. I went back to the script, and I tried to work out what was useful and what wasn’t. It’s a slow process of building it from there and working out, in terms of the language — which is beautifully, slightly heightened for both Poe and the other characters — what does Poe do with that? He leans into it in certain situations, certainly when he’s holding court with his poetry. How does he present that to the world? And why is he presenting it in this particular way? Is he trying to fit in? Is he trying to impress someone?
That was all there in the script, and it’s just about moment-to-moment trying to be as truthful and as accurate and as playful as possible, in a way, because there was fun to be had with him. I hope the audience would enjoy him to some degree. That was my way of engaging. It’s fair to say, Scott, we didn’t really talk a lot about scenes before going in. We just would try and see what happened on the day. If stuff had to move, Scott would brilliantly come over and say, “Perhaps think about this,” and you’d just gently steer off in a different direction. That was very much how we approached the entire shoot.
Cooper: That’s right. I give very specific direction, nothing abstract, so that the actors feel safe to take incredible chances.
You see how a character this grandiloquent could use language as a defense against those attempting to know him. But I felt, the more verbose this Poe became, the more I saw the character reveal himself.
Cooper: It’s quite opposite the way I normally write, which is to keep the dialogue as spare as possible because so often dialogue is insignificant. I convey emotion wordlessly, because that has a stronger connection to a character, to their inner life: what it is that drives them, what it is that terrifies them. But in this particular sense, for one of our most verbose writers, I thought it was kind of perfect. And then when you have an actor like Harry, who can handle this so brilliantly, as the rest of the cast do, it makes my job much easier. So often, as I’m writing a screenplay, if it sounds like Movie Talk, I cut it. These actors can make Movie Talk sounds great.
You brought this up, but the reason I cast Harry was because of “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” which is the only performance of his I’ve seen. I was utterly enthralled and thought that he was the only person who could play Edgar Allan Poe. It was [the way he delivered those readings,] and it was his look, as he fortunately bears a resemblance to what I imagined a young Poe to be like. He has a sense of vulnerability he isn’t afraid to express. I knew he could handle all of these long passages of dialogue that I have. But what I wanted to explore with Poe is what drives someone to madness. How much pressure has to build before they explode into violence, and what causes morality and decency to erode in otherwise decent people? Poe probed these questions repeatedly in his writings, and the answer was often just a hint of deeper, more unfathomable problems at play. This film uses fiction to explore a truth that’s familiar to anyone who has turned Poe’s pages, which is that real horrors seldom have easy explanations.
Questions of violence and morality place “The Pale Blue Eye” in conversation with your past films, especially “Out of the Furnace,” which also starred Christian Bale. You’re on your third film with him here, and I understand you have more collaborations planned, including a secret project called “Valhalla,” also at Netflix.
Cooper: Yes, he and I will eventually make “Valhalla.” I’ve long wanted to reimagine Laurent Cantet’s 2001 French film “L’Emploi du temps,” which translates to “Time Out,” which is about an unemployed man who finds his life sinking more and more into trouble as he hides his situation from his family and friends. So, at some point, hopefully, you’ll get a fourth film from Christian and myself. Both of us, certainly, like stories that say something deep-rooted about American life and its relationship with the darker corners of the human psyche.
They’re incisive about masculinity as well. There are such levels of confinement to your characters, prisons within prisons they seek to escape.
Cooper: If you look at the American male at the moment, there’s this malaise American men are experiencing, which psychologists or sociologists would call “depths of despair.” And those course through my work, for the moment.
Given the endurance of your collaboration with Bale, Scott, what did you both want to achieve through “The Pale Blue Eye” that felt particularly fresh or appealing?
Cooper: Neither Christian nor I like to let the audience off the hook. We take on complex characterization and make films in which the edges aren’t sanded off. We aren’t afraid to toil in that darker, psychological sandbox. Really, Christian is obsessed, as am I. But you don’t choose your obsessions. Your obsessions choose you. He and I, and Harry as well, are purveyors in the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional and psychological experiences. Off-set, Christian is one of my closest friends. He’s certainly my closest collaborator, and our relationship has deepened since “Out of the Furnace” and “Hostiles.” Christian seems to embody what it is that I want to express, and he’s easy to write for, quite honestly. And he can easily play a man who’s in the throes of a spiritual crisis, which we find in our films. And, finally, it was Orson Welles who said, [as quoted by Josh Karp in “Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind,”] “The great danger for any artist is to find himself comfortable. It’s his duty to find the point of maximum discomfort, to search it out.” Christian and I tend to do that.
And, Harry, what was it like to build your performance alongside Christian, to have a scene partner for a film this intensely psychological?
Melling: Working with Christian was just a joy. I look back to shooting it and see his generosity as an artist and as a person, the way he really led by example. I will never forget the first scene we shot, I had quite a lot of words, and Christian was just there constantly. He would always be in the room, sitting down, giving me the space to work out what I needed to do and just being completely available to me. And I thought, “This is a man who really cares and is there for me, the performer.” Going beyond that, everyday was an exploration, trying to see what might reveal itself to us in that moment. If Christian had a superpower — I hate the word superpower and don’t know why I used it, but if he did have a superpower — it would be the ability to be present in the moment and to really listen to everything you say, to respond to what you offer. When you find yourself in that situation, anything can happen. That’s where you want to be. He elevated my performance just through the way he is.
“The Pale Blue Eye” is in select theaters now and streaming on January 6 on Netflix.
