THE WRITE STUFF

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer on translating a complex short story for the screen

One of the most influential films for me growing up was Close Encounters,” recalls Eric Heisserer, screenwriter and exec producer on Arrival. “I’d been hungry for another story like that.” Talking to Total Film in October 2019, Heisserer remembers his reaction when he first read Ted Chiang’s Hugo Award-winning novella, ‘Story Of Your Life’. “I was simultaneously shattered emotionally and also uplifted,” he says. “My first thought was really, ‘How can I inflict this emotion on other people?’”

Arrival was hardly an easy sell, though. Heisserer struggled to find producers as excited about the story as he was. “It’s a non-franchise science-fiction story about linguistic relativity,” he smiles. “The moment you say ‘linguistic relativity’ in an office, it doesn’t get the type of reaction that, say, ‘Jason Bourne’ would.” Heisserer tells TF that there are 12 spaceships in the film because he took the project to 12 buyers, who all passed.

The desire to tell a story championing communication and collaboration – in a marketplace where alien movies were all about invasions, and fearing ‘the other’ – motivated Heisserer to continue, despite frequently being told that, “You’re never going to get this movie made because you don’t have a human punching an alien at the end of this!”

There was also the heptapods’ complex visual language to contend with. Heisserer’s fascination with languages came from his father, an ancient-history professor who was always learning new ones. Heisserer ended up painstakingly inserting rough graphics into his screenplay, which were later refined by production designer Patrice Vermette. “The logograms were developed into a robust language with a vocabulary of more than 100

WORDS MATT MAYTUM words nested within them. When you see a symbol on Louise’s computer, analysing a logogram – that’s actually a computer script running authentically in real-time.”

Directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Amy Adams, Arrival was a hit – taking $200m+ at the box office and scoring eight Oscar noms (including one for Heisserer’s script). “The validation was that it did resonate with people,” says Heisserer, after his screenplay was frequently rejected as non-commercial or “too intellectual… which I think is insulting for audiences”.

Audiences got the message loud and clear. “It did find a home. It wasn’t just because they were smart. It was because it has a big heart as well, which is what Ted’s story does. I’m still really being a custodian of Ted Chiang’s original work.”

ARRIVAL IS AVAILABLE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY.