ALIEN TERRITORY
Quebec director Villeneuve finally gets to explore science fiction’s big ideas with Montreal-shot Arrival
Denis Villeneuve learned a hard lesson while shooting his new sci-fi thriller Arrival in Montreal.
“Never do karaoke with a movie star who sings like a goddess,” the Quebec director said. “It’s embarrassing.”
The movie star in question was Amy Adams, who shared her own recollections of the evening during the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Villeneuve was still trying to piece together where things went so horribly wrong. He and members of the crew had decided on karaoke as a way to blow off some steam after a tense few days on set.
“The thing about karaoke,” the filmmaker said, “is that in order to do it, you have to involve alcohol. I was convinced I was able to sing Skyfall, which was according to me a big success. According to my partners, not so much.”
It’s hard to feel sympathy for Villeneuve, who has had “big success” tattooed on his forehead since his stunning 2010 drama Incendies was nominated in the Oscar category of best foreignlanguage film. From that moment, the director’s ascent to the world stage was swift.
His 2013 thriller Prisoners features an illustrious cast anchored by Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman, and includes Viola Davis, Terrence Howard and Melissa Leo. That film was followed closely by Enemy, a quirky adaptation of a Jose Saramago novel, also starring Gyllenhaal; and, in 2015, by the Mexican drug cartel intrigue Sicario, starring Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro, which premiered in competition at Cannes.
And now, Arrival. Villeneuve would love to have been on hand for the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 1, or for its Canadian premiere at TIFF 10 days later. Alas, he was stuck in Budapest, chained to the set of his biggest, most high-profile project yet: Blade Runner 2049, due in theatres on Oct. 6, 2017. It’s the same place he is reached for an interview.
“We’ve been here months and months,” he said. “We’re approaching the end of the journey — just a few weeks to go.
“It was a ver-r-ry long journey ... I was used to making movies taking 55 days of shooting. After that, I was destroyed. Now I’m going 100 days. It’s like an experience of endurance. I’ve discovered what the word ‘stamina’ means.”
Arrival can be seen as a prelude of sorts to Blade Runner 2049, allowing Villeneuve to dabble in the sci-fi genre before tackling the long-awaited sequel to one of its cinematic classics. And yet to hear the director tell it, his entire 20year career and perhaps his whole life have been leading up to this point.
“For 40 years, I’ve been wanting to do science fiction,” he said. “I grew up reading sci-fi.”
When he started making films, “my old friends kept saying, ‘How come you’re making all these psychological dramas?’ For a long time, I was seeking the right material to make sci-fi for adults, exploring our reality through a story that has content, not just special effects.”
He found what he was looking for in Ted Chiang ’s novella Story of Your Life, from which Arrival is adapted. Therein, a bunch of ominous alien vessels appear, hovering over locations around the planet. Linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks (Adams) is recruited to communicate with these strange creatures and, in the words of Forest Whitaker’s Col. Weber, “find out what they want.”
Arrival is an existential sci-fi film, as much about Banks’s conflicted emotional state as the looming threat of an alien invasion. There are no elaborate battle scenes or creatures popping out of people’s stomachs. Instead, we witness the understated efforts of a softspoken academic to decode a foreign language for which she has no point of reference.
Villeneuve’s own starting point was the inner world of his protagonist.
“I was thinking that what could bring freshness and something original to science fiction was if we approached the film from an intimate point of view,” he said, “following this woman and feeling what she’s going through.”
It didn’t hurt having an actress of Adams’ calibre to anchor the story. She brings not only marquee clout but inherent depth to everything she touches, and was Villeneuve’s first and only choice for the role. He sent her the script, expecting to wait months for an answer. She replied the next day.
“She said it was one of the most beautiful things she had ever read,” the director said. “She’s one of the easiest actors I have ever worked with. The only difficult thing was that she’s such a perfectionist. She’s so tough on herself. She’s never satisfied.
“Meanwhile, we’re all mesmerized, amazed at what she’s doing. Apart from that, she’s the sweetest human being, the most generous trouper.”
It was a little trickier for him to pin down Adams’ acting partners — not Whitaker or Jeremy Renner, who plays a sympathetic mathematician, but the mysterious visitors with whom her character must find common ground.
“We conceived extra-terrestrials that are pretty surprising, morphologically,” Villeneuve said. “I kept expecting someone to put the brakes on our exploration — what we did is pretty eccentric — but the studios embraced it.”
He’ll be turning a little closer to home in his depiction of Blade Runner’s replicants, the killer humanoid robots that stalk Harrison Ford in the original film. Ford is back for the sequel, which stars Ryan Gosling along with Robin Wright, Dave Bautista and Jared Leto. But don’t expect Villeneuve to cough up any state secrets at this stage of the game.
“Unfortunately, if I talk about Blade Runner,” he said, “my cellphone will explode.”
Klaatu Barada Nikto. Every science-fiction nerd knows the famous phrase from The Day the Earth Stood Still, and how it caused the robot Gort not to destroy our planet.
But imagine how fantastically difficult it would be to translate an extraterrestrial language from a standing start. We can’t even talk to whales and dolphins.
Arrival, the newest from Quebec director Denis Villeneuve (last years’s Sicario; next year’s Blade Runner 2049) is a thoughtful, even somewhat dry exploration of language and translation. (On the other hand, it caused me to tweet “I have seen something amazing” after my first time through the film.)
When a dozen alien spaceships arrive on Earth, humanity’s first priority is to figure out their intentions: friendly or nefarious?
Linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams, down-to-earth as a film like this needs) must struggle with these questions. She works with physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner, the perfect left brain to her right) and answers to Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), part of the military surrounding the Montana landing site.
Villeneuve is working from a screenplay by Eric Heisserer, based on the short fiction The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang — well worth a read, but only after you’ve seen the picture.
The people of Earth, behave very much by the book. The U.S. camp is all helicopters and off-road vehicles, baggy field tents and HAZMAT suits. E.T. would feel right at home. When a military chopper arrives, landing lights ablaze, to collect Louise, it actually looks more like an alien ship than an earthly transport.
The aliens are, well, imagine a walking tree trunk with seven roots: a heptapod. The film’s score when they appear — by Villeneuve regular Johann Johannsonn of Iceland — sounds like a duet for whale and bassoon.
The aliens’ writing resembles a fractal pattern composed by a squid.
And it represents ideas and concepts but not vocalizations: There is no way to read it aloud.
The movie makes much of the idea that how we experience the universe is in part conditioned by how we describe it. How you compare someone to a summer’s day depends on whether you use one word to mean both blue and green (as some ancient languages did) or two, or many.
Arrival may even change your perceptions of such apparent constants as time, family and cause and effect. Note the opening words of the film, spoken by Louise to her daughter: “I used to think this was the beginning of your story.”
We sense some family tragedy, but the film counters with an implicit question: Would knowing your child is going to die —
whether through tragedy or time — change your decision to have her? Or, as one character says, “despite knowing the journey and where it leads ... embrace it and love every moment.”
And herein lies that ‘other hand’ earlier in this review: the human heart that beats within all good science fiction — for until the aliens actually land, all our stories are ultimately about ourselves. Louise is the best humanity has to offer — not perfect by any means, but fast (as in steady), slow to judge, resolute in decision.
Louise must deal with confusing messages. Are the aliens saying “use weapon” or “give tool”? And do they mean “please give us a tool” or “we’ll give you a tool”?
The answers, when they come, may leave you mind-boggled, as though you’d just been taught a new word for a shade between blue and green, and also seen that colour for the first time. It may leave you in tears — my first viewing was the nearest I’ve come in a long while. It will probably leave you wanting to see it again. But it will not leave you.