Eric Heisserer on how he wrote ‘Arrival’
Adapting pre-existing source material might sound easier than penning a completely original screenplay from the ground up, but Eric Heisserer faced his own set of challenges when trying to turn Ted Chiang’s short story Story of Your Life into what would eventually become Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.
It all worked out pretty well in the end, considering the acclaimed sci-fi netted upwards of $200million at the global box office and won a solitary Academy Award for ‘Best Sound Editing’ from eight nominations, including ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ for Heisserer’s efforts.
That being said, one major obstacle to overcome was that Story of Your Life had been deemed “unfilmable”, and it took Heisserer six years to whip the script into shoot-ready shape, describing it as “the most stressful pitch of my whole career” to GQ, admitting that he “lived with it for so many years”.
Further explaining the difficulties when speaking to Vox, Heisserer was aware that “the story doesn’t really have any conflict”. He still struggled with cracking the translation from page to screen, though, with the answers to one of the biggest questions taking centre stage: “Our early attempts at building this narrative without that conflict added felt very flat, and felt like there were no stakes,” he said.
Adding: “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.”
Streamlining and simplifying didn’t prove to be a hindrance, either, as Heisserer noted that “clarity is a virtue, and striving for a kind of emotional transparency with one another is really crucial”, going on to explain that “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” and tied that to the seemingly-simple logline of an alien invasion.
On the other side of the coin, Heisserer revealed during a Reddit AMA that he did get some interesting notes from his peers around Hollywood before Arrival was eventually awarded a green light, stating: “I can’t say the number of times I was told, ‘We’ll make this if you change it to a big action-invasion film where a human punches an alien at the end’.”
The language of the heptapods proved to be another sizeable roadblock to overcome, as Talkhouse discovered, both in terms of how they communicated amongst themselves and with Amy Adams’ Louise Banks: “In my first draft, I had Louise teaching very basic vocabulary to the heptapods,” he said. “This was integrated into a series of shots done like a language lesson montage. Simple action verbs, nouns, subject-predicate material.”
Realising that “the kindergarten-level vocabulary was absolutely necessary” despite being told by the producers that “this isn’t sexy”, Heisserer went back to basics: “I returned with the core question humanity wanted answered by the heptapods, written on a page,” he said. “I dissected the question one word at a time in a defence of the need for basics. I realized how ridiculous I sounded: Here I was, defending a series of little scenes of a woman teaching alien life words like ‘eat’ and ‘walk’ and ‘home.’ But this movie is about process, and I was passionate about protecting Louise’s process.”
Spending time with linguists and physicists “to hear how they talked to each other” ended up justifying his approach and saw Heisserer form the key dynamic that ended up powering Arrival‘s story to such great heights. It wasn’t easy by any means, and it took a lot of time, but he delivered in the end and then some.
