How I Wrote Arrival

The heptapod language was a unique problem for me as a screenwriter because when I got to talking about it I knew how important it was in the film and I got more and more novelistic in my description of it whenever I got to that in the script and if there's one thing I hate it's a screenwriter trying to be a novelist and so I got very frustrated and I was out to dinner with my wife one night complaining as usual about whatever as I was working on and I'm like I don't know how to make this work without just spending way too much time on the page and she's like well just show me what you're talking about and I scribbled something out there was a circular kind of cuneiform that had a few little branching things and I said roughly this and she says well did just put that in the script instead and I'm like you can't put way can you put a graphic I had bumped into Ted Chiang online a friend sent me a link to a story that was published in this entirely on an online a science-fiction zine and it was the story understand and I devoured that and my mind was blown away at the end of it I thought this guy can write oh my god what else has he done and discovered the collection stories of your life on Amazon and I just instant Biden and then a few days later shows up at my at my door and once again to procrastinate I was like I'll just read a story I've done a page that's good and and then they're like a few hours later I had devoured about half the book and I had to stop at story of your life because it emotionally wrecked me like I had this a weird mix of just like feeling uplifted and hopeful and also completely shattered and just put it down and went out and hugged everybody within walking distance and just was like wah ha and then sat back down I thought how can I torture a greater audience with this how can i infect a bunch of people with this feeling and the story the HEPA pods actually don't show up it's not a first contact per se it's over a hundred different pieces of technology that just show up around the world that are essentially flat-screen TVs and we have Skype calls with the half deparment light-years away and that was you know academically interesting no no tension at all there so the first real choice I made was to have them show up at her front door and instantly that gave me a kind of a strange ticking clock the public's need for an answer I knew that I wanted to make this first and foremost a story about Louise and about this relationship to her daughter and that the second tier is the is the visitation I also didn't want to build the story as you know like a usual suspects Keyser söze reveal of aha now the magic trick I wanted to be able to tell the audience the entire story in the first few minutes or in the first you know a couple of pages and at least the emotional part of it of all this stuff that made it all the way the first five pages in the last five page of the state the same almost exactly from the first draft I can tell you that I started writing just the mother-daughter scenes and I and I did a lot of transposition from the short story because there are some lovely scenes with mom and daughter in the short story and then I made up a few of my own and I just had those kind of banked and then when I started writing out the the rest of the like the present-day narrative it was a matter of like finding out where I could insert those what's the context for those and how do I transition to and from them properly because you know the transitions are a big deal but now I'm not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings store your life the the first draft was about three months it was a free month long process the first draft the very first draft I had a whole series of scenes that were a little scene let's really of Louise teaching very basic vocabulary to the des pods and Ian would demonstrate and it was just super like kindergarten level words and and they were like Eric this is not sexy at all this is really boring this is ride oh no you know no actor just gonna want to try and do why what are you doing here what are you doing and I said I don't know how to get a rep like this is what they got I learned like no why do they have to learn this I'm like fine and I went to their whiteboard and I wrote this is the question we're trying to get to and here's how difficult it is and here's how many sessions you have and after all that then you have to have enough vocabulary with them so that they can answer the question and you can't even go specific you know because I said what's a Pulaski and they're like we don't know and I'm like well it's a tool that firefighters use you can't start with Pulaski got to start with tool yeah and they just stared at me for a while and they like that's the scene that goes in the movie get rid of this other crap that's the scene the trick that I learned from a friend of mine named John Rogers use a feature and TV writer John has always been good about nesting exposition or framing it as an argument and so if you have some sort of debate that happens among the characters and each of them is trying to defend their point by explaining why they think they're right you're still explaining things mm-hmm but it's under the context that I just I think it makes it more digestible and that I think is why this scene in which there's a scene in which Louie's diagrams sentence and defends why it's important for her to teach her the way that she is we learn a lot about language in general through that that moment that we wouldn't otherwise this story this film is a bit like building a boat inside a bottle and you'd be very careful with the way that it was constructed you can't just over clarify something or oversimplify something you can't have a just a mountain of exposition we didn't want a 40 million dollar TED talk and and we also didn't want to talk down to our audience I never like get condescending having been around really smart people scientists and linguists and other consultants that we use to make sure this film authentic the way that they talked to each other is never like whoa speak English doc you know we never get to that so it was about doing our best to preserve the telling of a story that was basically 2+2 and not saying for the message in Ted story there was more about Louie's embracing the inevitable it was a very kind of deterministic realization that likely everything is predestined and you just gotta find a way to make peace with that and I was a bit rebellious about that I'm like Ted I don't like that I don't like that at all I think it's more profound for me if she has a choice if she has free will and can change her future and yet she chooses to have Hannah that to me is more affecting and that's really where I wanted to land on it but if I did that that I had to make sure it wasn't a rock climbing accident in which Louise could just call it eight before and say hey don't go Denis was the most enriching relationship that I've had with a director of my career so far and he just he behaved very differently from anybody else that I've been in the room with I've been so accustomed to getting to a point where a director is attached or are thinking about becoming attached and and it's a very brief meeting where you know often the director will get my name wrong and and not really and like it's like look this is the last time I'm gonna see you maybe before the premiere so so and then off they go so with Denis though he got interested in everybody all the independent finance ears and my producers were all like oh my god prisoners on sandy's dude this campus is a go movie if we get him and no pressure Erik but don't mess this up any so we had a breakfast meeting at a little spot near his hotel in in Westwood and sat down and it wasn't like a little half-hour session at all it would it went on for like a couple of hours and we just did a deep dive on philosophy and science and religion and geopolitics and would occasionally steer back to the script and he'd have some questions and at the end of it we you know ain't got up he shook hands he's just like Eric this is nice let's do this next week sure okay yeah great that every week my Bruce is like please dear gods say he's on board no but we had a croissant and a mocha and we talked about politic it was great he's like what the hell are you doing Eric and then finally after all that time I got a call from my agent like holy crap dude you did finally work he's on board it's official and then a minute later did he called me himself and he says all right Eric no we are married and he meant it like he was the only director I've worked with where before before any sort of change to the script he would call and say now Eric if I move this if I had just this does this break anything he grilled me on every page he grilled me what's the subtext here and this you know and what's this line of dialogue and why did you use his verbage in that in the narrative like he he just combed through that to try and glean as much information as possible many many drafts had said you know Louis says something in Mandarin to the general and we were about three months away from shooting and then he calls me Eric Eric what did she say I don't know something hundred I have the woman here who translates from Mandarin she's gonna teach Amy Adams what to say what does she say I'm like you have to teach oh right because she's actually saying oh oh god this is like Eric Eric Eric this is the line that saves the world this is the most important line in the whole movie Eric what are you done to me you must find this for me right now and I'm like oh god I started sweating I said I just come up with like Draft after draft of draft and I guess it was about two dozen lines later that I found a poem that I and I did some alliteration so that I made it sound I guess more poetic I don't know god this is pretty good I sent it to him and he says I don't okay I deeply love this but so I'm there seeing it finally put together for the first time at Toronto at the Film Fest tension right next to me and we get to that scene and the bastard Denis doesn't use subtitles for any of that like he's just like throw that away and I'm like so what the dying wife's last words were in war there are no winners-only widows there's a line that was so important to me with her and it was when she was talking about why Hannah's dad left and I was talking about the unstoppable unstoppable disease and she said kind of like you with your poetry in your swim trophies and what she's talking about is her daughter's contributions to the greater world and how she affects many other people possibly even spires other people and how if you remove Hannah even from the short time that she's there on the planet how many of the people as she affecting possibly even negatively and the thought about if even if she knows that there's a heartache a horrible heartache at the end of this journey with her daughter and she's gonna lose her after that time the fact that she manages to touch other people during the the years that she's on this planet and what that effect has on everybody else and what a possibly even her loss has on on her friends and the family of her friends that that that there's far greater consequences to that so there's a there's some selflessness involved in her going through with her choice and there's also just the fact that she would rather have loved and lost than to never have Hannah at all hello everyone thanks for watching if you're interested in learning more about the writing process of your favorite TV shows and movies please consider subscribing and turning on the notification bell thanks again for watching I'll see you next time as we take another look behind the curtain

Channel: Behind the Curtain

Views: 812,345

Keywords: film, video essay, screenwriting, lessons from the screenplay, screenwriter, ARRIVAL, ARRIVAL TRAILER, amy adams, scifi, denis villeneuve, eric heisserer, jeremy renner, ted chiang, the stories of your life and others, screenwriting tips, now you see it, the director's cut, tyler mowery, behind the curtain, science fiction, arrival, science fiction movies, filmmaking, making of, behind the scenes

Id: WDXlaa9JpuI

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 07 2019