Arrival

Arrival (2016)

Timing: 1:56 (116 min)

7.625/10
19176

7.644/10
439921

7.9/10
856000

All about film

Video 36

Photo 151

Actors and characters

Release date

2016-11-10

Country

United States

Production

21 Laps Entertainment, FilmNation Entertainment, Lava Bear

Genre

Drama, Science Fiction, Mystery

Budget

$47 000 000

Revenue

$203 388 186

Website

http://www.arrivalmovie.com/

Director

Denis Villeneuve

Actors

Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Mark O'Brien, Tzi Ma, Abigail Pniowsky, Julia Scarlett Dan, Jadyn Malone, Frank Schorpion
All actors and roles (10)

Scenario

Producer

Aaron Ryder, Shawn Levy, David Linde, Karen Lunder, Daniel S. Levine, Dan Cohen, Stan Wlodkowski, Eric Heisserer, Glen Basner, Tory Metzger

Operator

Bradford Young

Composer

Jóhann Jóhannsson

Artist

Aaron Morrison

Audition

Francine Maisler

Editing

Joe Walker
All team (470)

• The film is based on Ted Chiang's novella "Story of Your Life" (1998).
• The film was originally titled "Story of Your Life", but focus group testing showed that most people disliked the title, and it was eventually changed to "Arrival".
• Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams had previously starred together in "American Hustle" (2013).
• Before Denis Villeneuve became the director of the film, Nick Mathieu could have directed it.
• The composer of "Arrival", Jóhann Jóhannsson, had already written music for Villeneuve's films such as "Sicario" (2015) and "Prisoners" (2013).
• Bradford Young, nominated for an "Oscar" for "Best Cinematography," was the first African American to be nominated in this category.
• Filming began on June 7, 2015, in Montreal.
• Before Denis Villeneuve became the director of the film, Nick Mathieu could have been in charge of the production.
• Bradford Young, nominated for an "Oscar" for "Best Cinematography", was the first African American to be nominated in this category.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.”
• 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.
• 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.
• 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."
• Bradford Young, nominated for an “Oscar” for “Best Cinematography,” was the first African American nominated in this category.