Arrival
Short description
Mysterious spacecraft appear at locations around the world, hovering above the ground without explanation. The United States government turns to linguist Louise Banks, who is brought to a site in Montana alongside physicist Ian Donnelly and Colonel Weber to establish contact with the visitors. The aliens communicate through sounds unlike any human language, and as Louise works to decode their writing, nations grow suspicious of one another and the situation edges toward open conflict. The team races to determine what the visitors want before the standoff turns violent.
Denis Villeneuve directed the film, the eighth of the thirteen features he has made in chronological order, arriving between Sicario and Blade Runner 2049. Eric Heisserer wrote the screenplay, and Aaron Ryder, Shawn Levy and David Linde produced. Amy Adams leads the cast as Banks, with Jeremy Renner as Donnelly, Forest Whitaker as Colonel Weber, Michael Stuhlbarg, Mark O'Brien and Tzi Ma in supporting roles. Seventy-four cast members and 471 crew members are credited.
Made for 47 million dollars, the film took 203 million dollars worldwide, a strong return on its budget. On IMDb it holds 7.9 out of 10 from around 856,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.6 out of 10 from nearly 20,000 votes. A film critics' rating of 8.5 out of 10 from 441 reviews places it above both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The written form of the alien language was invented by artist Martine Bertrand from Montreal, and Hanna’s drawings are actually drawings by Bertrand’s son.
- Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams had previously starred together in "American Hustle" (2013).
- Filming began on June 7, 2015, in Montreal.
- The composer of "Arrival", Jóhann Jóhannsson, had already written music for Villeneuve's films such as "Sicario" (2015) and "Prisoners" (2013).
- The decision regarding the exterior design of the alien spacecraft was made early in the project, but Denis Villeneuve struggled with the concept of its interior. He simply couldn't visualize it, as it needed to allow people to move around freely. Eventually, they decided to use variations in the direction of gravity, a solution that seemed perfectly logical and obvious to everyone.
- A fragment that would eventually become the scene of Louise’s dream, performed by Amy Adams, was originally shot as a regular conversation between the characters played by Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker. The scene was then completely removed from the film, but soon Denis Villeneuve and Joe Walker realized that this scene was the only place where the extremely important, from a plot perspective, hypothesis of linguistic relativity was mentioned. Also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it suggests that the structure of a language influences the worldview and outlook of its speakers, as well as their cognitive processes. It was decided to re-include this episode in the film, but already in the form of a dream.
- Amy Adams’s character managed to prevent a human military attack on the spacecraft arriving from another world by traveling to the future and returning, after which she convinced the character played by Ma Zhi to abandon his warlike plans with a single phrase. At Denis Villeneuve’s direction, the phrase remained off-screen, but it became known to the general public thanks to screenwriter Eric Heisserer. According to him, Adams’s character repeated a phrase spoken by the future wife of Ma Zhi’s character, who had died: “There are no winners in war, only widows.”
- The film was originally titled "Story of Your Life," but focus group testing revealed that most people disliked the title, and it was eventually changed to "Arrival."
- Before Denis Villeneuve became the director of the film, Nick Mathieu could have been in charge of the production.
- The spacecraft’s exterior was inspired by the asteroid (15) Eunomia (sometimes spelled Eunoemia), discovered on July 29, 1851, by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis. Villeneuve liked the asteroid’s appearance, which he himself described as “utterly insane” and “something resembling an egg.” The director decided that this appearance would perfectly convey a sense of mystery and, at the same time, threat.
- The film is based on Ted Chiang's novella "Story of Your Life" (1998).
- Director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer invented a full-fledged language of an alien civilization. They and the rest of the film crew managed to come up with over a hundred different fully functional logograms (a logogram is a grapheme depicting a word or morpheme), and 71 logograms were used in this film.
- Bradford Young, nominated for an “Oscar” for “Best Cinematography,” was the first African American nominated in this category.
- When conceiving the aliens, the filmmakers at one point or another considered octopuses, whales, elephants, and spiders. Director Denis Villeneuve wanted the aliens to generally resemble “something one might imagine in a surreal dream or nightmare,” and closer to the end of the film’s production, he wanted them to evoke associations with death.
- From the very beginning, Denis Villeneuve only envisioned Amy Adams in the role of Louise. She gave her consent to participate in the project within 24 hours of receiving and reading the script.
- Denis Villeneuve and the screenwriters working on the project did everything possible to ensure the plot’s twists and turns were scientifically impeccable. They consulted with the renowned scientist and inventor Stephen Wolfram and his son, Christopher Wolfram, on all these matters.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
