UNIQUE FILM IDEA PAYS OFF
Screenwriter’s Arrival pitch wasn’t popular at first
As far as hit Hollywood movies go, this one couldn’t be more unlikely: A linguist and a physicist are charged with deciphering alien communication while ruminating on the relativity of language and the nature of time.
Yet Arrival, the sci-fi drama starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner as scientists communicating with a group of “heptapods” from outer space, has been beloved by both critics and audiences — to the tune of a $195-million (U.S.) box-office haul worldwide.
On Sunday, screenwriter Eric Heisserer took home the trophy for adapted screenplay at the Writers Guild Awards. And the film has racked up seven Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, directing (Denis Villeneuve) and adapted screenplay.
When he first pitched the idea around town, the response was pretty much crickets.
Except Arrival, which is based on the short story “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, didn’t die.
Heisserer decided to forge ahead and write a script on spec.
How did you come across Chiang’s story?
I happened to get a link to one of his stories from a friend. I thought, this is really fascinating writing, accessible science fiction that gets deep.
Then I saw his collection of stories and I Amazon-ed it. I was like, “I’ll just read the first story.” And five hours later, there I was. I only stopped when I got to “The Story of Your Life.” I was totally crying, and I was like, “I want to adapt this.”
I wanted to make other people feel the way I did, to make them ugly-cry like I did.
How did you manage to persuade a Hollywood studio that a film about alien linguistics was a good investment?
I’m pretty bad at pitching to producers: I was like, “This is a non-franchise sci-fi film with a female lead about linguistic relativity.” And people were like, “Security!” (Laughs)
Finally, Dan Levine and Dan Cohen at (the production company) 21 Laps — they read it after reading some material of mine that showed I wasn’t writing just horror scripts. We had several meetings to talk about how this could be a movie.
This ultimately resulted in the first major change from the short story: The aliens show up and they park all over the world, rather than just communicating through this looking glass. That was a key decision. We could really add portent to the story.
But it’s still a very complex script — with even the most casual dialogue having to address nuanced issues of language while moving the plot forward.
It was lots of trial and error. I fell on my face a lot. I think writing in my own space where it was just me and the two Dans, we gave ourselves permission to experiment, to play around with some of the strangest ideas. A good amount of it was rooted in the source material. Ted explores a lot of this in a way that is quite palatable. My job was to carry that over without breaking it.
You also created some of the early alien logograms, which you inserted into the script and which inspired the ones used in the film. How did you come up with the design?
When I was describing (the logograms) in the script, it was too novelistic — it was too much verbiage on the page.
The original design came from Elvish (the fictional language created by Tolkien). I had been looking at languages that were completely invented.
And I settled on Elvish at first because people were using it to inscribe rings — a circular thing. So, I thought, I can start with that and make it my own.
So when the aliens land, who should they take first?
They’re going to have to start giving out numbers because there will be a large number of people that will want to leave with them. They’re going to be like, “Please don’t leave me here.”