“How I Wrote ‘Arrival’ (and What I Learned Doing It)”

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer talks creative process in writing Arrival.

NOTE: Yesterday I hosted a panel at the Austin Film Festival featuring Eric Heisserer and I was reminded of how smart the guy is, so I am reprinting this post from November 2016.

A fantastic first person essay in The Talkhouse yesterday in which Eric Heisserer goes into significant detail about how he adapted “Story of Your Life”, a short story by Ted Chiang, into the screenplay for the movie Arrival.

Discussing his love of science fiction and his passion for Chiang’s short story, Eric reveals how he wrote the project on spec:

I pleaded with the author to let me write the script on spec, which meant optioning the rights for an extended period of time. I pitched him my take, which felt akin to saying, “I’m borrowing your car. It may come back with some aftermarket stuff and a new paint job. Please, trust me.”

He did, and I spent the next year learning why science fiction is so difficult to get right. Here are some of the many lessons this script taught me.

Here are some of the lessons Eric learned in the process of writing Arrival:

1. Sometimes the plain truth is more interesting than the beautiful lie.
 At some point, you embrace what kind of story your movie is, and lean into it. If it’s a martial arts action bonanza, your character and story moments happen in the framework of fight sequences. If it’s a musical, your subtext plays in song. This movie was about process — the process of cracking a new language and teaching our own.

— —

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.

Here is a pic I took of that page, back in 2012 (where I even misspelled “orrery”):

Other lessons:

2. Let the smart people be smart.

3. When in doubt, go back to the source material.

4. Don’t be trapped by your limits. Get creative.

And then the biggie:

5. The head is important, the heart is vital.
 In all my draft work on the adaptation, I spent the most time on the intellectual and political challenges of the story. But if I ever encroached on the intimate, emotional through-line of Louise’s journey, the story fell apart. Other scenes could be sacrificed, reworked, moved, or cut to the bone. But director Denis Villeneuve and I found a bare minimum of steps to Louise’s personal journey, and that became our Alamo; our hill we would die defending. Denis had a knack for visuals that spoke on an emotional level while also dovetailing with the intellectual challenges our characters faced. Marrying those two, sometimes in a single line of dialogue or image, made the film come alive. It made us feel the story. And at the end of the day, what drew me most to Ted Chiang’s story was the way it made me feel, and above all else we wanted to transport and share that feeling with audiences.

Arrival is one of those rare movies which works at both an intellectual and emotional level, dialed into both Head and Heart. It is a superb movie and I can’t recommend it enough. It opens this weekend. Go see it!

For the rest of the article, which includes actual script excerpts, go here.

Twitter: @HIGHzurrer.