Johm Cusack playing on Poe’s spook-house vibe

John Cusack proves his love for Edgar Allan Poe and talks at length about his experiences playing the celebrated poet in the just released The Raven

Q: The Raven is out and you played a fictionalised Edgar Allan Poe. What liberties did you take?
A: When you read Poe’s works, you see how prophetic he was, how many genres he invented and the many styles he was capable of. You see the comic side of him, someone who’s taken the comedy and heightened it to be fantastic. Once he gets caught up in his own genre, you can go back to his letters and pull the language. That just felt like a great thing to do. We felt for sure we didn’t want to do his little moustache, because we wanted to stay away from the Charlie Chaplin postage stamp thing. As much as I love that, I thought it would be limiting. And because he was dirt poor and an alcoholic, I got as gaunt as I could, I got down to about 190 pounds, which is below what I was in high school.

Then you just immerse yourself into the material, all of his letters and writings, and get into that spook-house vibe.

Q: Did you have to play around with themes and adapt any of Poe’s works?
A: The Raven is a fictional adaptation of the life of Edgar Allan Poe, and brings to life the world of Poe’s poems and short stories, combining it with multiple elements of classic thriller movies. The basic idea was to portray Poe as more of a character in one of his own stories to get a whiff of his imagination. By having Poe become a part of his stories and then having to deconstruct his own story, you get to hear Poe on Poe. It was exciting to replicate Poe’s work and bring to life some brilliantly horrific moments from his murder mysteries. We have used some of Poe’s works like The Murders In The Rue Morgue, The Pit, The Pendulum and The Tell Tale Heart to an extent that they depict the dark perceptive world of a writer, by taking viewers through his work. It took some amount of adapting and trying out different ideas in order to get to the essence of Poe convincingly.

Q: You seem to have a passion for roles that are extremely different and a penchant for the supernatural. Does The Raven indulge in the supernatural element that defines many of Poe’s works… and was inspiration taken from the celebrated poem itself?
A: Aren’t we all attracted to the abyss? It’s poetic. Who doesn’t like Halloween, the day of the dead, the supernatural, ghouls, the underworld, dreams, and nightmares? It’s an interesting character and headspace to explore. It’s not something I want to stay in but it’s nice to visit it. The Raven does bring a certain supernatural element in its delivery. It skews the barriers of fantasy and reality. It is riddled with fictional stories, while containing factual information about Poe’s life. The symbol of the raven serves as an obvious but satisfying metaphor throughout the movie, shadowing the death of the characters in a role that’s similar to its symbolic function in the poem. The poem’s central theme is also replicated through Poe’s own life in the film.

Q: India will be seeing The Raven after most of the world and so the reviews are already out. What do you, as someone who played the role of Edgar himself, feel makes this film a must-watch?
A: I think the reason why people should go watch this film is so that they can enjoy a piece of mystery as it existed in Poe’s writing. If watching this film makes you go back to read his works, we would have succeeded in creating what we wanted in the first place. This is a film which will appeal to lovers of goth, suspense thrillers and detective fiction.