“So many of our conflicts and our problems stem from miscommunication.”
The magnificent sci-fi film Arrival, which proved a surprise box office hit in its opening weekend, wouldn’t exist without the passion of its screenwriter, Eric Heisserer.
Heisserer was so taken with Ted Chiang’s short story "Story of Your Life" that he wrote numerous drafts of a film adaptation of the story, convinced the emotional wallop he felt over the story of a grieving mother trying to communicate with aliens who have just landed on Earth could make for a powerful film. It took time to convince Chiang to sell Heisserer the rights to the story — and then it took time to get the film made as well.
But lucky for moviegoers, Heisserer persisted. The movie that is in theaters, directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Amy Adams in the lead role, is one of the best of the year, and a welcome respite from the usual bombast of Hollywood science fiction.
Heisserer took some time to talk with us about communication difficulties, what he learned about his own profession from studying linguistics, and how he taught himself to think like an alien. This interview has spoilers at the end, but they are clearly marked.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
One of the biggest differences between Chiang’s story and the film is that the film has to heighten the conflict by having the world nearly go to war. How did you play that up without betraying the core of the story?
That was the biggest change that we discovered needed to happen to make it a film. The story doesn't have really any conflict of that nature. It doesn't need to. It's a lovely literary conceit in its own right and works without that drama.
However, our early attempts at building this narrative without that conflict added felt very flat, and felt like there were no stakes. There was no ride. The more we played with it, the more Denis and I both realized that if aliens did land on earth and the public didn't get immediate answers as to what their purpose was, the more everybody would freak out.
That got especially ironic for us, going into this most recent election cycle, just to see how many things get blown out of proportion right away.
The film really is accidentally resonant in a lot of ways, because it’s about failures of communication, and in an age of social media polarization, we’re talking about that more than ever. What did working on this project teach you about better communication?
I learned clarity is a virtue and striving for a kind of emotional transparency with one another is really crucial. It not only keeps you at peace, but it forms a deeper connection with one another that will extend beyond language, beyond race or religion.
We just don't do it enough. So many of our conflicts and our problems stem from miscommunication.
You initiated this project, writing it on spec and doing many, many drafts. What was it that made this a passion project for you?
It was the emotional reaction I had to Ted's story. I walked away from that feeling emotionally devastated, but also uplifted. I had a head full of ideas.
I had no real layman's exposure to concepts like Fermat's Principle of Least Time, or Snell's Law, or linguistic relativity, and he served all of that up for me in a really emotionally effective story. At the end of it, I wanted to share that experience with a much wider audience.
While, of course, I continued to force a copy of his book on friends and family for the next decade, I had loftier aspirations, and that was to find a way to adapt it to film.
You mentioned some of the big, heady ideas the story contains. Did you have to research those to write the script?
I did. I was grateful for Ted as a resource throughout the development. He and I shared probably 100 or so emails over the course of the script-writing phase.
Beyond that, I spoke with my father, who was a classics professor at Oklahoma University for three decades and had a lot of experience in foreign language. He gifted me with a few references and resources that I consulted to learn more about linguistics.
Then I had to figure out what some of this math was. I had a character — Gary in the story; Ian Donnelly, Jeremy Renner's character in the film. I had to make sure that he was accurately represented as well.
There’s an extra line [that was cut from the film], at the very beginning when he and Louise are introduced to each other. After he says, "You're wrong. The cornerstone of civilization isn't language, it's science," the follow-up is, "You don't need to know the word for fire. You just need to be able to make it and burn someone with it."
I had to figure out how to get into the brains of both a linguistics expert and a theoretical physicist. Both of them are wildly more intelligent than I am. Then I had to put those crazy intelligent people on the challenge of their lifetime.
As someone who works with words, did digging into linguistics help you understand your own profession better?
I had already experienced a number of trials and tribulations as a screenwriter when my script then gets into the hands of a whole team of other people, starting with the director. And a lack of clarity in the writing or any amount of subtext that was a little too obscure for one member early on in the team — that can snowball into a quite different scene or a quite different film experience at the end of it.
So I feel like I had an emotional connection to Louise, who's all about clarifying intent. As a linguistics expert, her job, especially facing down an alien lifeform, is making sure we all understand what it is that they're trying to say and what their purpose is.
Was there a point in writing this movie when it felt to you like things started to click, even if it wasn’t 100 percent there? I know you did a ton of drafts.
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.
How did you find a way to invite the people who didn’t like the story into the movie, if at all?
You can only compromise so much with this. There is a point at which you break the story to reach over the aisle to some of the people that don't connect with it. I can tell you there were so many times when an executive or producer across the table from me said, "We will make this film. We will hire you write this if you only do ‘X.’" And however minor it felt to them, it broke the spine of the story to me.
You also wrote the script for the horror movie Lights Out, another movie based on a very small idea. What have you learned about expanding small stories into big ones from those two projects?
Lights Out was a fantastic little short film with a scare that you knew worked. Our lucid brains react pretty intensely to that short. In talking with the director, he had some ideas and some themes that he was very excited to explore. He had something that he wanted to say, just as I felt that Ted's story has something to say.
When you have that, when you have an emotion or a message that you want to get across, it's a lot easier to expand on things than a short film that's just a concept or a character's story writ large.
Warning: Spoilers for the end of Arrival follow.
This movie has a pretty big reveal toward the end. How do you keep that reveal hidden but still play fair with the audience?
The rules that I set for myself with this were to make sure that I was playing fair with the characters and particularly Louise, that her reaction and her actions in this script, her behavior in this script made sense for someone in this experience.
That meant making sure that we could justify her decisions, who to tell [about her visions], or why not to tell them. What's the look on their face when she has some of these time fugues, and how much does she know at that moment? Of course, this isn't a card that we hold back until the very end. There are plenty of moments throughout this film that reveal our ending.
Screenwriters talk about trying to get into the heads of their characters, but two of your most important characters here were effectively omniscient aliens. How did you get into their points of view?
They were particularly difficult for me. Here I had characters who already knew the ending of my script before I'd written it. Quite often I was frustrated by them.
So whenever I got lost in the woods on adapting "Story of Your Life," I'd go and I'd look at a screenplay that I'd written that had already been produced. I had a completely different perspective on that.
All the words had been written, then I could see the finished product based on that and where it deviated and sometimes why. Oftentimes, I had a moment of depression.
But I could come back with a larger world view and imbue in the behavior of the Heptapods, a kind of tranquility that I just didn't have as a human being writing the thing.
They were aware of how it was all going to turn out, and their gentleness in treating humanity, even for all of our flaws and all of our misbehaviors, was really a source of inspiration. I built, basically, with Abbott and Costello, two of the greatest motivational speakers I could.
Arrival is playing in theaters throughout the country.
