Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Making movies in Western Pennsylvania is becoming as common — or more so — than finding writer/director Scott Cooper and star Christian Bale at work on a Hollywood backlot.

Cooper directed Bale in 2013’s “Out of the Furnace,” Bale filmed portions of 2012’s “The Dark Knight Rises” without Cooper in Pittsburgh, and the pair reunited on Netflix’s “The Pale Blue Eye,” streaming Friday, which shot throughout Western Pennsylvania last winter.

Based on the 2003 Louis Bayard novel of the same name, “The Pale Blue Eye” tells the story of Landor (Bale), an investigator haunted by personal loss, who is asked to investigate an apparent murder at West Point. That is where an oddball student, Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling, “The Queen’s Gambit”), inserts himself into Landor’s investigation as a fellow sleuth.

Though set in Upstate New York, Western Pennsylvania locations offer credible substitutions, from Westminster College in New Wilmington standing in as West Point to Compass Inn Museum in Laughlintown, Ligonier Township, which serves as a tavern.

Landor’s house is a private home in Portersville, not far from McConnells Mill, where the film begins with an opening scene of Landor on the edge of Slippery Rock Creek.

So what is it about the region that draws Cooper back?

“I had a really wonderful experience the first time when I shot ‘Out of the Furnace,’ made a lot of great friends, one of whom is your incoming (U.S.) senator, John Fetterman,” Cooper said during a mid-December Zoom interview. “I love the people of Pittsburgh; the crews are fantastic. Love the people of Braddock. I have a real affinity for that city.

“And in terms of trying to re-create the Hudson Valley in 1830, it felt like Western Pennsylvania would be as good a place as any,” Cooper continued. “It’s the same Appalachian Mountain chain. I knew that it would give me the landscape that I was looking for. I knew that it would certainly give me the weather that I was looking for. So I was more than happy to come back.”

Cooper credits Bale with the “brilliant idea” to cast John and Gisele Fetterman as extras (John can be glimpsed 14 minutes and 46 seconds into film, seated at the tavern bar).

“(We met) John when we were filming ‘Out of the Furnace,’ ” Bale recalled. “Scott discovered in looking at multiple actors for the film … that some people’s faces don’t look right in the 1830s. And we’d been talking about that, and then we were talking about John Fetterman and I said to Scott, ‘You know whose face would look right?’ So we gave John a call, and he was gracious enough to come and visit us for a day.”

“The Pale Blue Eye” filmed almost entirely on location (including at Allegheny Cemetery in Lawrence­ville) with the exception of one scene that takes place inside McConnells Mill (the mill’s interior was built on a soundstage at 31st Street Studios in the Strip District).

While Bale’s Landor is the film’s lead role, the most colorful character is Melling’s excitable Poe, the famed writer who really did attend West Point.

“When I read the script, I was like, ‘Oh, interesting, he seems very different.’ There (are) qualities in him that you wouldn’t necessarily expect there to be. … They’ve really fused historical fact with fiction,” Melling said in a Zoom interview. “I would try and invent from what Scott wrote who this Poe was — to make him foolish, to make him clumsy, to make him awkward. All these things you wouldn’t necessarily associate with this very dark and gloomy older version of Poe. This journey for me was to try and work out what events in the story take him to this far heavier, darker place.”

Cooper said he was keen to adapt “The Pale Blue Eye” after his father, who taught English, introduced him to Bayard’s novel, which takes its title from a line in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

“I was really taken with this notion of a young poet at the center of a detective fiction,” Cooper said. “We’re all entrenched with an idea of who Poe is from his later works, from ‘The Raven’ and ‘Tell-Tale Heart.’ And I wanted to tell a story about young Poe before he was really formed as a poet and as a writer, and the events that take place in this narrative inspire him to become the writer that he ultimately became.”

With multiple movies made in Western Pennsylvania under their belts, might Cooper and Bale return again?

“Pennsylvania hasn’t quite gotten rid of me, that’s for sure. I love that state,” Cooper said. “I love the people and the (film) crews. I quite frankly don’t know what’s next. I have written a few things that I have slipped under Mr. Bale’s door, and we’ll see if any of those come to light, but it took us 10 years to make this one.”

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