![]() ![]() ![]() I had a lot of heavy lifting to do, because the story works so well as a literary piece, and doesn’t worry about the things that make a movie work.ĭr. And I wanted to share that with the world. I had learned something about Fermat’s principle of least time, and Snell’s law, and non-linear orthography, and I didn’t even know what any of those terms were before reading this story. It was a total emotional connection where I just was gutted and heartbroken, while my head was just full of giant ideas. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.ĭavid Sims: What was the initial spark for you after reading “Story of Your Life”?Įric Heisserer: I didn’t get any sort of cinematic reaction from the story at all. Adding the “geo-political panic element” helped him translate that small, emotional tale into something grander, Heisserer said in an interview with The Atlantic that also touched on how he crafted the enigmatic visual look of the Heptapod language and expanded the emotional thrust of his story. That’s something Arrival’s screenwriter Eric Heisserer thought about when crafting his script, which was adapted from the short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. It’s an extraordinarily hopeful message for a particularly grim moment in global affairs, where isolationism and nationalism are on the rise in the U.S. In bringing this language to Earth, the Heptapods are doing more than granting the planet an incredible new technology: They’re also seeding humankind with empathy, pushing them together, distributing their language in pieces to different countries and demanding they cooperate to assemble it. But their strange written language, when properly learned, allows the speaker to experience time in a non-linear way and access all past, present, and future moments at the same time. In Arrival, the motivations of the visiting Heptapods are vague-they simply tell Louise they will need humanity’s help to avert a great crisis thousands of years from now. In the film’s arresting climax, with the help of Heptapod technology that lets Louise simultaneously glimpse the present and future, she calls Shang and gets his attention by telling him something she couldn’t possibly know: his wife’s dying words. It’s with the Chinese government-in particular, the stoic General Shang (Tzi Ma), who brings his country to the brink of war with the aliens out of his fear that they pose a threat. But Louise’s most crucial breakthrough isn’t with the seven-legged, squid-like “Heptapods” that have come to speak with humans. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) as she tries to connect with a race of aliens who’ve landed spacecraft all over the globe for some mysterious purpose. The masterful sci-fi film Arrival is ultimately a story about communication. We wanted something totally different.This post contains spoilers about the ending of the film Arrival. "We looked into ancient Asian language, Arabic language, tribes from Northern Africa," he said. Vermette says coming up with the design was a "eureka" moment. "The next day, I went to the office and I showed all the different designs to Denis and he went, 'What is that? That’s exactly it!' From there, the real development went underway." I think you solved the puzzle,'" Vermette recalled. "O ne night I was at home with my wife having dinner. My wife said, 'Would you mind if I tackled the problem tomorrow?' And I said, 'No, go ahead.'" Vermette says the next day when he came home, Bertrand had about 15 designs set out on the kitchen table. They didn't incorporate that mysteriousness that he was looking for. Various examples of the heptapod (alien) language can be seen on display in this still from "Arrival."Īfter approaching various designers and linguists and coming up short, Vermette ultimately turned to his wife, Bertrand. He said everything he was coming up with was either mathematical or hieroglyphic, and they were all things humans could relate to. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. ![]()
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