A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
Not many sci-fi films can balance complex scientific theorems with an engaging plot line. But that was a priority — and a challenge — for Eric Heisserer, the screenwriter of “Arrival.” The screenplay is his adaptation of “Story of Your Life,” a short story by computer scientist and author Ted Chiang.
The movie was directed by Denis Villeneuve — the filmmaker behind the movies “Incendies,” “Prisoners” and “Sicario" — and it stars Amy Adams as Louise Banks, a professor of linguistics and the single mother of a young daughter.
When alien spaceships suddenly appear around the globe, the U.S. military summons Banks to try to communicate with the intergalactic visitors.
When Heisserer visited the Frame, he told us what compelled him to adapt Chiang’s writing for film and how he kept the script both intelligible to an audience and factual to the scientific world.
That was the big thing to tackle, and the first question [the producers] had for me, which [was], How do you turn this into a film? Where's the dramatic narrative? And I said, I think we're going to find our drama in a real-time response from the world and how they would react to aliens arriving.
It was a lovely courtship. He was interested in the story and was interested in the movie, but he wouldn't sign on until speaking with me. One meeting turned into six or seven and they were all coffee meetings in which it felt like I was trying to lure a woodland creature out of the forest. He was just very careful and cautious all the way. I really understood that and was grateful for it at the end of the process when he signed on officially and called and said, Alright, Eric. Now we are married. I was like, Oh, okay! This is a different relationship than I've had before! Then we were off to the races. He had a lot of opinions, but the best thing he did for the movie and for me was to validate that this was a movie about process and about capturing realism.
I wanted to retain a synthesis of all those pieces of her identity. Her motherhood is obviously the keystone to the story. But the fact that she is other things as well is what I responded to when I read Ted's work and what I was careful about transposing from that format to the screen.
[British scientist] Stephen Wolfram was a consultant on the film. He went through the whole script stem-to-stern with me and we talked about the way to maintain scientific accuracy. I myself wound up hanging around a bunch of scientists and language experts for a solid year during early development. And what I discovered is that they talk to each other as if everybody can understand what they're talking about. They never really talk down to one another. I wanted to pass that into this script. There's never really a character that says, Whoa, whoa! Speak English, doc! They share these things with each other as peers. While I don't know if everybody is going to know all the scientific principles behind what they're talking about, they are going to get a sense that these characters are being honest with each other and therefore honest with the audience.