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MEDIA: John, how did you prepare for this role, and what did you do to get Poe's particular style of speech down?
JOHN: I think the script was terrific, and James and I went through it with the writers and some people and tried to pull as much of Poe's own dialogue as we could from his letters and from his novels, so that we put that cadence and idiom into the structure of this genre's story, which is basically a Poe story where Poe becomes a character in one of his own stories--so you have Poe deconstructing Poe. Even though it's fantasy, I was probably a little bit obsessive and drove James crazy. "Yeah, but Poe said this..." I was always trying to use his own vernacular and his own words as much as I could in the fictional setting. So we were trying to square that circle, in a way. And there's volumes and volumes of his own thoughts on his writings--you know, he wasn't shy about his pronunciamentos.
Given your research on Poe, how would you characterize him as a person?
JOHN: I think he was a perpetual orphan of the world [because of] his feelings of abandonment and loneliness from losing his mother, and then his stepmother, and then his wife...He was a genius, and he was kind of a bastard, and he was a rogue, and he was all the things that you think of him naturally--like inward-looking and melancholy and soulful and all those things. But I think he was just this blasted soul. He was kind of a wanderer. So I think everybody can relate to that. He's become sort of a shadow archetype of the culture. He was like a pioneer into the underworld. I think he was a fascinating figure. So I just thought, "If I can immerse myself in that, and if we can feel that, it would be a great challenge."
Did constantly being in his mindset affect you negatively?
JOHN: I don't know. We were in Hungary and Serbia, and it was the winter, so it sort of felt like we were as far away from the world as we could be. [laughs] And we were on these cobblestone streets, and we were shooting a lot at night, so I just sort of felt like I became a vampire. And I'd sort of cling to Alice...And I don't know if I was disagreeable, but I might have been.
ALICE: [jokes] You were.
JOHN: [laughs] I was? It felt like a bender, but in a good way. But I know when I finished, we were at the airport in London, and James looked at me, he said, "You better go home, man." [laughs] And I went back home, I did scare my family. They were like, "What the f*** happened to you?" I was pretty strung out...But it was the kind of thing where you just have to go all in. Whether you like the movie or not, I think we all went all in...It seemed like the only way to go.
Alice, how well did you handle all of that morbidity?
ALICE: I only came out of that darkness that we dove into about six months ago...I think it took about nine months to leave. It was, as you say, winter. It was dark. The streets were bleak and misty, and we were making a story about an insane genius. [laughs] And I think that we definitely went there, didn't we? It was really intense, actually.
JOHN: Yeah. There's something, I think, in Poe's work, or sort of the fabric of going into the underworld. You know, mythologically, the raven is this bird that goes down to the underworld and it gets all this secret knowledge, and then it comes back up and it's disfigured and has one eye, but it knows all these secrets of the universe, right? That's the myth? So I think Poe was a guy who took all of his suffering and all of his faults, but he was genuinely interested in going into the underworld and exploring these areas that most people are afraid to explore. So there's something kind of courageous about that...He was so vain he said, "I could never believe in God because I couldn't believe in anyone superior to myself." But yet he was always looking for that space between life and death. He was always looking for that other world. And I think that since he was abandoned by his mother, and since he was an orphan, he put all that religious fervor into this eternal love he had for women. And I think he really did love women. So he was always sort of searching for that. So I think for him, death and beauty were always in the interplay. That's why he's the godfather of goth, you know? [laughs] He sort of created all these genres.
 
Alice, which was more confining: wearing the corsets in your character's wardrobe, or being trapped in a false grave with only one open side?
ALICE: Well, it wasn't always [open]. Sometimes I was completely blocked in. So that was ultimately the most confining thing. But I was actually having this conversation yesterday, because there seems to be a perennial fascination with corsets. And I realized that I don't think they're any worse than high heels--I think they're just as painful, and just as beneficial. But if not, corsets are actually better, because they help your posture. But definitely being buried alive was genuinely horrific for one moment, because when they first did it, the coffin lid went down, and I took a breath, and the oxygen went from the coffin, and I panicked then.
JAMES: But I think she was very brave, also. There's not too many actresses that you could say, "Hey, I'm going to put a lid, and I'm going to put dirt on you. Just hold your breath. And then I want you to come out and look like you're panicked." It was a mixture of acting and reality there.
ALICE: And you liked feeding me dirt, as well. [laughs] You liked throwing dirt.
James, did you try the coffin out yourself?
JAMES: [jokes] It's hard for me to answer that question truthfully with Alice next to me, actually. But I did crawl into the [open] one. It wasn't exactly made for me, but yeah, I did try it.
ALICE: One gallant young man went in first.
JAMES: That's true, yes. The stand-by props man Steve went in first.
Poe's stories have obviously inspired generations of artists to this very day. What are some of your favorite works of his?
ALICE: I liked ["The Spectacles"], the one where the man doesn't have his spectacles on and he falls in love with the old woman.
JOHN: I like his more absurdist stuff. "King Pest" or "Hop-Frog." And then of course there's like the great classic allegories, "Fall of the House of Usher" or "Masque of the Red Death"...
JAMES: "Murders in the Rue Morgue"...The fact that you would come up with a story which is about an orangutan sneaking into a room, cutting off the heads of a couple of people, escaping through a spring-loaded window, and they can't tell whether the orangutan is the people's voices from all over the apartment...Like, his imagination is incredible. Like "The Tell-Tale Heart"...Hearing this guy breathing over and over and over again, so much that he feels like he needs to sneak into the room under the cover of darkness and chop him into a million bits and then put him underneath the floor...I mean, he was out there!
Given that PG-13 movies are often easier to market than their R-rated counterparts, was there any pressure to tone down the violence?
JAMES: If you're going to make a movie about Poe, you have to speak to what he did. I mean, it would seem churlish not to have, like, those scenes with the pit and the pendulum, or the severed tongue, or the apartment building to start with. I know some people are a little repelled by some of the gore, but I think that was, like...You know, Poe would do it. I mean, he did do it. He was so much more graphic than the film is, you know? [laughs] So no, there wasn't any sort of "tone it down." I think everyone was on board with what we were all trying to do.
JOHN: It's hard to argue with the source material. You can always go back to the source material and go, "What is it that we're doing?"
John and Alice, how was your experience of working together? Did anything surprise you about each other?
JOHN: No, nothing surprised me about Alice. When I met her and saw her, I sort of assumed she would be as good as she was. But you just always hope that you have a certain kind of chemistry with someone when you work with them. And with Alice, it was just easy and effortless. So no, her talent is pretty obvious, I think. I loved working with her.
ALICE: I really enjoyed learning from John, the sort of act of [preparation]. I think you do it a lot in theatre, but not so much in film. And we had a little bit of time on this in Hungary to sit and talk, and I really learned about the benefits of covering ground and inventing stuff, and then throwing it away and working through the history of the relationship and what had happened between them, and what hadn't happened between them. And that allows you to be very confident when you arrive on set and know exactly where you stand as a couple, and what you've experienced. And so that, for me, was very informative.
JOHN: I remember we had a long debate as to how much they'd slept together, the characters.
ALICE: I don't think we ever decide if they had or hadn't. [laughs]
JOHN: Because the character was living with her father, and she was rich and Poe was in a hovel...
ALICE: She was meant to be chaste.
JOHN: Yeah. So we were trying to think, "Have they slept together or not?"
ALICE: I think they'd kiss, which was just as scandalous.
James, what was it about John that made you feel he was right for the role of Poe?
JAMES: I think from the very first meeting I had with John, John sort of came fully loaded...He obviously is very bright, he knew a lot about Poe, and I think he just immediately saw the place that I wanted to go with the character...And so I think that he just intrinsically got it. You know, we talked about Hunter S. Thompson, that John knew a little bit. And so I think there was that parallel...There was Hunter, there was Poe, there's other obviously famous literature characters that you could delve into. But I think John really got into the headspace of Poe, and really pulled out a great performance--being fictional, too. Like in all the research that we did, it's not like you had to hit every note of Poe like you would have to a biopic, for example. So I thought that was fantastic.
And Alice in her role?
JAMES: I think I just had one meeting, and then we talked, and she's very bright and erudite and forthright...And then I remember we did this funny little test in the front of this theatre in Soho in London, and we sort of went through the machinations...You know, you have this sort of dance that you do when you do one of those tests. Because they're really weird. Like you're in a room like this, and you go, "Now pretend you're buried in a box, and you've been in there for like five days." And she was like, "Oh yeah, okay, sure." And I remember I was standing over the top of her with this camera, and I'm like, "This is a really weird situation to be in." [laughs] But Alice was completely there. And I could just see that she would be fantastic in the role. So it was great to work with both of them. Their chemistry between each other was also great. They got on. And so every time they came to set, they would come with something fresh. "What about this? What about that?" And then once we actually got into filming, we got onto a roll where we do something, and they would hold up their hand, which meant "go again." And you'd always get something different. So ultimately, you'd have this unique selection once you got into editorial, where you could nuance the character.
JOHN: Also, I think when you're working with somebody, you get a language with them where you're sort of trying to figure [them] out...And then after a while, you start to finish each other's sentences, and then you're all on the same page. And that's what you really want. And something that was great about Alice is that she emits a kind of intelligence about her where you think she could really understand Poe's literature and her work in a deep way. She just sort of reeks of intelligence, I think, on screen and as a person. And also, I remember I talked to James, and he was like, "I want Alice Eve." I go, "Why her? Tell me why..." [to Alice] I shouldn't say this. Should I say that?
ALICE: You're in too deep now! What are you going to do, abandon it? [laughs]
JOHN: And he says, [whispers] "She's got a secret." And I thought that was a really, really smart thing to say. And I thought that was a really interesting thing to say, and really provocative. And it's true. She's very intelligent, and she's got secrets, and that's what makes somebody really interesting to watch, you know?
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