Arrival poster art by Michael Manomivibul
November 18, 2024
By Koraljka Suton
On September 1, 2016, Denis Villeneuve’s science fiction drama Arrival premiered at the Venice Film Festival and soon took the world by storm. It became an immediate blockbuster, grossing $203.4 million on a $47 million budget, and received widespread critical acclaim, with many considering it one of the best films of 2016. Come award season, it emerged victorious with a total of twenty-five wins and one hundred sixty-seven nominations, among which were eight Academy Award nominations (with only one win: Best Sound Editing), two Golden Globe nods, and even a Grammy nomination for the film’s composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media). But when filmmaker and screenwriter Eric Heisserer first got the idea of turning Ted Chiang’s Nebula-winning novella Story of Your Life (1998) into a screenplay, he couldn’t have predicted that getting production companies interested would be such a daunting task.
Upon coming across Chiang’s short story Understand, Heisserer was immediately sold on the SF author, which prompted him to buy a collection of his short stories on Amazon. After reading Story of Your Life, Heisserer was reduced to tears. Left, in his own words, “both heartbroken and uplifted,” the screenwriter wanted other people to experience what he had experienced—and recommending the book to everyone he knew didn’t prove to be enough. But turning it into a motion picture that had the potential of reaching countless people? “That’s the gift, there. That’s the real gift (…) if I could manage it,” is what he told Matt Grobar in a 2016 interview for Deadline. He would spend the next few years pitching his spec script to production companies, but to no avail.
Heisserer believes it was his work on the drama Hours (2013), which he directed and wrote, that gave him the credibility needed for others to come aboard. Because up until that point, he had only worked in the horror film genre, (co-)writing scripts for reboots, such as A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), prequels like The Thing (2011) and sequels such as Final Destination 5 (2011). But with Hours, a movie about a father trying to keep his newborn alive during Hurricane Katrina, the screenwriter showcased that he was more than capable of venturing into new territory and exploring emotional depths. Lo and behold, producers Dan Cohen and Dan Levine of 21 Laps Entertainment became interested in Heisserer’s script, which proved to be a turning point in Arrival’s inception. Shawn Levy, another producer from the production company, claimed that they had come across Chiang’s short story back in 2011 and were taken aback by its themes and power. Keen on getting the film made, the producers helped Heisserer better the script before starting to look for potential directors and studios.
Finally, Villeneuve was approached. Having waited thirty years to shoot a science fiction movie and in love with Chiang’s novella, he very much wanted to sign on to the project. Even though he was in the middle of shooting and editing his 2013 film Prisoners, the director started working on Heisserer’s script together with the screenwriter. Needless to say, Villeneuve being otherwise engaged resulted in everything taking much longer than expected. Soon enough, Amy Adams, who was the first choice for the main role, was cast (and would later get a well-deserved Golden Globe nomination), and Jeremy Renner quickly followed suit. Seeing as how a lot of changes had been made to the original story in the process of adaptation, Villeneuve thought it best to alter the title out of respect for Chiang’s novella. He also found that Story of Your Life sounded more like a romantic comedy than a science fiction film. Out of the hundreds of ideas that were floating around, the director ultimately landed on one of the producer’s first-ever suggestions from a couple of years back. Arrival, as Villeneuve said, “wasn’t ideal.” But it was the best.
With Max Richter’s poignant composition On the Nature of Daylight setting the tone, Arrival opens with a touching and heartbreaking montage—not unlike the one in Pixar’s Up (2009)—of a mother-daughter relationship, from the moment the latter was born to her untimely death at the age of twelve. We do not know how much time has passed since the daughter, Hannah, succumbed to an incurable illness. But we see the mother, esteemed linguist and college professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams), going to work on what would soon become a pivotal day in history. As she is teaching a class to a small number of students who had the courtesy to show up, news breaks that twelve UFOs have been seen hovering over different locations around our planet. Louise is recruited by US Army Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) in an effort to discover ways of communicating with the extraterrestrials inside the spacecraft above Montana. But before Louise can reach the point of asking them what they want and why they are here, she must first come to understand their language. This proves to be no easy feat, given the fact that their spoken language, which is akin to whale sounds, does not align with their written one—phrases encoded in circular ink blots that the aliens spew out of their tentacles. With the help of her fellow recruit, physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), Louise slowly but surely begins creating a shared vocabulary with the newcomers and making her results known to experts from other nations who are attempting the same. Unfortunately, the rest of the world does not seem to have as much patience as the protagonist, nor as much understanding and compassion for that which is ‘other’.
Being a linguist, Louise knows very well that language is the foundation of civilization. It is “the glue that holds a people together,” as she states in her book, making it possible for us to communicate effectively and find common ground. Language helps us bring forth our internal landscapes in ways that are extremely basic and deeply profound. Much like music, it enables us to convey and share with one another the intricacies that make up the human experience, which, in turn, gives us a chance to feel seen and understood. This striving for true understanding is not just inherent in Louise’s vocation as a linguist but is also one of her core qualities as a person. Unlike the majority of the world and its leaders, she is not the least bit interested in playing zero-sum games but rather seeks to utilize our ability for meaningful interpersonal connection so as to arrive at a win-win. Even though the aliens in Arrival are as unhuman-like as it gets, both in terms of language and appearance, Louise’s primary objective is, and remains throughout the film, to truly understand them. And, in doing so, bridge the gap between the ‘self’ and ‘other’. How does she do it? By connecting with them—being to being. This delicate unfolding is touching and awe-inspiring to behold.
As anyone who has ever immersed themselves in more than one language can attest to, our perception of the world and ourselves in it irrevocably expands so that it can accommodate new nuances of meaning and being. Because languages are so much more than the words that comprise them. They are incredibly complex systems—linguistically, physiologically, neurologically, and psychologically. When we embark on a journey of acquiring a foreign one, new neural pathways are formed in our brain (courtesy of neuroplasticity), enabling us to perceive the world through the lens of the language in question. Arrival capitalizes on this notion, basing its entire premise on the (often debunked) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—also known as linguistic relativity—which postulates, in the simplest of terms, that the language we speak determines how we see reality. An example often given (although academically also debunked) is the fact that the Inuit people have numerous words for different kinds of snow and can thus see varieties of it that those of us who are not surrounded by it on a daily basis simply cannot perceive.
In Villeneuve’s masterpiece, Louise’s grasp on reality literally begins shifting as she starts opening up her consciousness to this strange new language, its written symbols representing not just particular words but also complex emotions and entire sentences. And the fact that these symbols are circles is in no way coincidental. Human languages are linear, meaning that we communicate the way we perceive time—sequentially. But the aliens in Arrival do not. Their perception of time is circular and their written language emulates that. To quote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “The beginning and the end are shared in the circumference of a circle.” This ability to now see time as the quantum field that it is grants Louise access to events in her personal life that will inevitably come to pass, as well as information she needs if she is to stop the aforementioned zero-sum game from taking place.
But as is the case with most works of art that deal with the non-linearity of time, the question of determinism vs. free will is a prevailing one in Arrival. And, unlike many of the abovementioned artworks, Arrival explores this question with the utmost delicacy, subtlety, and grace. If we are able to see what will happen (because due to the circularity of time, it has already happened/is happening as we speak), does that not imply that all of our choices are predetermined? And if so, is our decision to ‘do things differently’ not the very thing that will bring about the events we are trying to change or prevent?
The beauty and tragedy of Arrival lie in the following: it doesn’t matter that Louise’s choice has been predetermined. In fact, the notion that (her) ‘choice’ is illusory becomes completely irrelevant because her ‘decision’ is based not on a nihilistic acceptance of the inevitable—but on her deep willingness to go through the events that her future has in store. She wants to experience what it means to be(come) a mother, even though that implies living with the weight of knowing she will lose her child. Nevertheless, Louise chooses that she wants to carry the heavy burden of grief and sorrow because that means she will get to invite into her life a love unlike anything she has known before.
In saying ‘yes’ to love and saying ‘yes’ to life, she is also saying ‘yes’ to unimaginable loss and immense grief. Not only is she aware of this, but she also feels both love and loss in the here and now due to her newfound ability to perceive time simultaneously. And thus, her mourning process starts before the tragic event even comes to pass. Ultimately, it is no secret that all of us and our loved ones are going to die. What enables us to go about our daily lives, living as if we were immortal, is the mere fact that we are not privy to the hows and whens of our eventual departure. But grief spares no one because loss spares no one. And embedded in each seed of love is unavoidable loss. Grief is nothing more than a testament to that fact. Therein lies the dichotomy of the human experience. The character of Louise can attest to that—in her case, love and loss start co-inhabiting her being the moment she gains insight into the future. And in time, she learns to accommodate both. Because her capability to perceive time simultaneously is not the only thing that develops with her deep dive into the alien language—her capacity to hold love and loss simultaneously does too.
One of the hallmarks of truly remarkable movies is their ability to tackle larger-than-life subject matters through the lens of deeply personal stories. Arrival is, without a shadow of a doubt, one such remarkable movie. And in this sci-fi gem that deliberately hits much too close to home, the theme of our place in the cosmos and the prospect of learning a universal language that would enable us as a species to perceive the true nature of time is used as a means of telling one such personal story. That of a woman who, in the wake of discovering that everything is predetermined, chooses what meaning she wants to give to her life. For her, that meaning is found in the sanctity of connection. And I sincerely hope the same is true for all of us.
Koraljka Suton is a member of the Croatian Society of Film Critics and has a master’s degree in German and English. For her thesis, she did a comparative analysis of Spielberg’s ‘Band of Brothers’ and ‘The Pacific’. Koraljka trained at a Zagreb-based acting studio for six years and fell in love with Michael Chekhov and Lee Strasberg’s acting techniques. She is also a contemporary dancer and a Reiki master who believes in the transformative quality of art. Read more »
“When I completed the first draft and the bookends of the first three pages and the final three pages [which cover similar material], it felt like I was drawing a narrative circle and I just closed the loop. That felt right. I didn’t realize that I’d have to go through 100 drafts beyond that, but it was all additive. This is one of the rare experiences that I’ve had where every iteration in the script was a better version than the last. So often you go down the wrong road and have to back up and try again. That’s not to say there wasn’t trial and error in this. There was plenty of research and development that went on, but none of it subtracted from the core emotional story. That’s in large part due to the fact that Ted’s novella did so much of the heavy lifting. Though I discovered early on that you either like Ted’s story or you don’t like it at all.” —Eric Heisserer
Screenwriter must-read: Eric Heisserer’s screenplay for Arrival [PDF]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.
In this interview, host Jeff Goldsmith interviews screenwriter Eric Heisserer, who discusses branching out after establishing a career in one genre, finding inspiration for his projects, and what he does to prepare for a pitch. In addition, you will learn about the experience of socializing with inebriated astrophysicists, negotiating with studios that are apprehensive, the ways in which directing can enhance one’s writing abilities, and much more.
Arrival is not what you might think at first glance. It isn’t really about Earth’s first encounter with aliens, but with something more personal. Listen to Eric Heisserer, screenwriter of Arrival, talk about his process of adapting Ted Chiang’s short story for the screen.
Examining how Arrival was adapted from the short story it was based on, how clever editing kept the focus on the protagonist, and why good science fiction is really a study of humanity.
DENIS VILLENEUVE
“What was interesting for me in that project was the playfulness of the idea of language changing your perception of reality. There’s a link with cinema, with that. There’s a lot of things that I was really deeply moved by in the story, and the politics [between world powers] of it all were more in the background. They were there to bring tension and to give a proper journey. With Joe Walker [editor], we were in the editing room, saying, ‘Are we going too far?’ Then I would open the newspaper and say, ‘Oh, no. [Russia] just invaded Ukraine.’ Sadly, we are going through not a nice period. We’re seeing the result of a decade of reality TV shows, where the goal is to see people get humiliated, and the more they are stupid, the more they are stars. When people are looking at that shit for too long, they confuse politics and reality shows. The fact that Arrival seems like a balm on people’s souls right now means a lot. But it also means the world is really not in a good place.” —Denis Villeneuve
“The thing is, I met the heads of Paramount and they really wanted to do the film. At the time they said it was the kind of film they wanted to do because it was the kind of film that was missing from Paramount—and they had missed out on Sicario, which was taken by Lionsgate. But I recall that Paramount would have really liked to do Sicario, and so they were very aggressive on Arrival and really wanted to crush the competition. There were five or six who wanted it. Everyone was seduced by the script and the idea that Amy Adams was attached to the project. Everyone was really enthusiastic. She was the first choice, she loved the script and said OK in 24 hours, so it had wind in its sails. Amy came in really early, earlier than I would have thought. I thought it was going to be a much longer process. I was doing Sicario, so Arrival had to wait; otherwise we would have shot earlier.” —Denis Villeneuve
“The main thing I was attracted to was this idea of exploring culture shock, exploring communication, exploring this idea of language changing the perception of your reality. That was gold. The idea of the geopolitical transformation of the world is something I felt we have seen in other movies before, and it was not the strength of Arrival. It was something that needed to be there because our goal was to create a movie where the aliens have a stronger level of realism, so we needed to see the impact of those landings all across the globe. But I try my best to stay on Louise’s perspective all the time, so it’s seen from an intimate point of view. What is funny is that as we were doing the movie, sometimes there were things [in the film] where I was saying to myself, ‘Oh, come on. People are more wise than that.’ And then I would open the newspaper in the morning: ‘No, we’re okay. We’re not going too far.’ Even in the editing room, [editor] Joe Walker and I were sometimes wondering if we were going too far, and reality was always pushing us to stay there.”
—Denis Villeneuve
“How do you design the interior of a vehicle coming from a place where the laws of gravity and physics are different? What will it be made of? What will be the sound inside of it? All of those decisions took a lot of meditating and brainstorming with my production designer, Patrice Vermette. What I wanted to create was a sacred feeling, something that from a subconscious point of view would be a representation of death. We were inspired by the artist James Turrell, who works with color and light to create a feeling of infinity. So we had the huge chamber and at the end of it, we installed white silk that would provide the proper light in front of the actor. Behind the silk, I asked two puppeteers to play with shadows to create the impression of a presence so my actor would not be acting in front of emptiness.”
—Denis Villeneuve
Denis Villeneuve explains how he directed Arrival, from working with Amy Adams to designing a new alien race and more.
In this scene from Arrival, Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner’s characters meet the heptapods for the first time. Unsure of the aliens’ motives, they proceed with caution—they are fascinated by the heptapods but inextricably drawn to them. So, how does Denis Villeneuve create a situation that balances fear and intrigue? Using simple shot choices and frame compositions, Villeneuve brings Arrival to the top of science fiction movies. He keeps the heptapods mysterious yet familiar, threatening yet passive—and the overall experience of watching Arrival is a thrilling mix of fear and intrigue. Any student of directing and filmmaking can learn a lot from Denis Villeneuve and Arrival, one of the best science fiction movies in recent years. —StudioBinder
Go behind the scenes of Arrival—B-roll footage.
PETER KÖNIG & MEINERT HANSEN
Peter König and Meinert Hansen, two brilliant concept artists, produced artwork for Arrival. Their concepts feature preliminary design work for both the alien creatures and the spaceship.
JÓHANN JÓHANNSSON
From using space to avoiding “weird for weirdness’s sake,” the late great Oscar-nominated film scorer reveals how he creates his haunting soundtracks.
“Denis always involves me in the pre-production stage: I read the script and we talk about the mood and the role that the music needs to play. With Arrival, we didn’t talk much about the music and this was deliberate on his part; he basically gave me carte blanche to experiment. In mainstream cinema, there’s usually too much music. In Arrival, the use of space and silence is extremely important. When music is needed, it’s really there and it serves a purpose. I try to approach a project with a blank slate and just let things emerge. I start very early in the process because it takes a lot of time to work in this way. It takes time to find a mood and feel that has some character and individuality, and is not weird for weirdness’s sake.” —Jóhann Jóhannsson
Hrishikesh Hirway interviews Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson about the music of Arrival, his third collaboration with director Denis Villeneuve. A few excerpts from the conversation follow; listen to the episode below, and subscribe to Song Exploder on iTunes. For a transcript of this episode, click here.
On creating the overall sound of the score
“I was working in a studio in Berlin with some great analog tape machines, and spent several days recording various instruments, creating these rich, layered analog tape loops. I recorded them at various speeds. A low note, for example, recorded at high speed and then played back at the lowest speed becomes this subsonic rumble. We did this with several instruments: cello, trumpet, the human voice. On each channel we were doing sound-on-sound recording, recording over the sound while keeping the previous sound so we had this ghostly remains of the previous loop. These sounds were a very important part of the sound world that I was constructing. That really set the tone of the film.”
On the track’s percussion
“The rhythm was established very early on, this insistent bass-drum pattern. We used the modular synthesizer to create the bass drum. It’s played by a human, so it’s not a machine beat, it’s not quite on grid. The role of the bass drum is to keep a rigid tension throughout the track, because everything else is arrythmic, and kind of random. Those are really the only electronic elements in the whole track. The rest of the percussion is all pieces of wood from various trees, played with various mallets. Wood seemed to be something elemental. By moving up and down the plank you get different resonances, different tones. We did many layers of these performances, then I took those recordings and processed them further. They’re filtered, they’re distorted slightly.”
On the score’s vocal parts
“This piece was written to an exposition montage that shows the linguists working to decipher the vocal sounds that the aliens emit, and basically trying to learn their language. It was immediately clear that the human voice would play a large part in the score, but I wanted to use it in the way that it hadn’t been used in movies before. If you think of a science-fiction choir, you think of 2001 and György Ligeti; that was something that I definitely wanted to get away from. Find other techniques of using the human voice. I avoided long notes. I wanted to work with this stuttering, random rhythm pattern of female voices. I wanted something that was a cloud of staccato rhythms, unpredictable and out of time. It’s many layers of different singers. I was working with the Theater of Voices, conducted by Paul Hillier. Everything was written out on sheet music, but we also improvised. One of the first things that became clear was this this would be a wordless vocal score. The choir is never actually singing real words; they’re singing syllables, they’re singing nonsense words. I was listening to legendary avant-garde vocalist Joan La Barbera, a piece of hers named Erin. At one point you hear this leaping melody. She just does it once, but I latched onto that. I decided to sample it, and create a loop out of it. It’s almost like baby talk, like language being developed and being formed. And that kind of resonates with the actual scene, where they are reverse engineering the language based on the writing and on the sounds emitted by the aliens.”
BRADFORD YOUNG, ASC
Admirers of Young’s work know that the award-winning cinematographer established himself as a new voice with such independent features as Pariah, Middle of Nowhere, Mother of George, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Pawn Sacrifice, Selma and A Most Violent Year, as well as the big-budget features Arrival—for which he earned ASC, BAFTA and Academy Award nominations—and Solo: A Star Wars Story, and the miniseries When They See Us (for which he earned an Emmy nomination). But few might realize Young’s path to success was far from a direct route. —Bradford Young, ASC: The Importance of Inspiration
Bradford Young, ASC, takes us through how he related to the story in Arrival. He also discusses how the film’s aesthetic influenced the shooting process.
12-minute interview with cinematographer Bradford Young, ASC, on Arrival.
Learn the 10 best lessons for cinematographers from Bradford Young, ASC.
“Life is pretty mundane at times, and every now and then something unexpected shows up and creates a really interesting twist and turn. In this story, it’s really about the mundane life of a lonely, melancholy person and then all of a sudden these aliens show up. You think the film is about one thing—mortality and loss—and then these aliens show up, and you’re like, ‘What are they here to offer this story? What are these aliens, what is this existential thing going to offer to a life that’s already realized and figured out?’ That’s what we tried to achieve.”
—Bradford Young
JOE WALKER, ACE
Editors on Editing: Glenn Garland, ACE, talks to Joe Walker, ACE, about editing the film Arrival.
Here are several photos taken behind-the-scenes during production of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. Photographed by Jan Thijs, Martin Villeneuve © Paramount Pictures, 21 Laps Entertainment. Intended for editorial use only. All material for educational and noncommercial purposes only.
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