TRANSCRIPT
Preparing for 'Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive' was actually tough because there is so much information about him, and in a way you have to filter out all of the biases you have about who you think he is, and get to who the man really was.
I read some great biographies about him.
I read a lot of his poems again, and it sounds funny, but I looked at a lot of pictures.
There's a weird thing about actors, you're just trying to see, can I look - can I see into that person?
Can I get to that person by looking at their photograph?
He really does come through in his photographs.
It's a really weird experience.
But, so I did a combination of different techniques to try to figure out who this guy was.
Filming this was I guess about two or three weeks of pretty intense scene work.
It was intense to memorize, it was a lot of material, a lot of his poetry had to be memorized exactly - I mean exactly - word-perfect and punctuation perfect.
But the emotional workout was intense.
He was a person of high emotions, whether that was despair or fear, anguish, dread - these are heightened emotions.
He really lived in a place where everything was at 100 all the time, and that's exhausting.
And so shooting that sometimes, I would look at what we were going to shoot and just think, 'ugh - I cannot go down that path today, but I have no choice.'
