Reddit AMA: Eric Heisserer, writer-executive producer, “Arrival”

Yesterday Eric Heisserer did an AMA on Reddit, the focus being his new movie Arrival which debuts here in North American on November 11. Some highlights:

I loved the short story (and will be going to Arrival opening night) so much but it is just that, a short story. Was it hard adapting such a short story into a feature length film? What did do to avoid just putting new narratives in for the sake of filler? — smgulz

Excellent question. I was lucky enough to have Ted as a resource while I wrote it on spec, and the biggest hurdle was to infuse the movie with conflict and dramatic escalation — aspects not needed in the story because it was built as a literary piece. So we had to make sure the new “organ” of the geo-political panic wasn’t rejected by the “host” of the core story.

Thankfully (and also regrettably) current events continued to prove to us that something like this would freak everyone out. And if the public weren’t given any clear answers about the alien visitors, they’d invent their own worst-case ones. — HIGHzurrer

Can you talk about how the optioning of Ted Chiang’s short story came about? — monimata

I carried his book around for years, hoping to find producers read “Story of Your Life” and fall for it like I did. Dan Cohen and Dan Levine at 21 Laps finally did, and together we got the rights to the story. — HIGHzurrer

Hi there. I’m a linguist from Lebanon, and I gotta say, I’m so excited to see this film. I’ve recently read Ted Chiang’s story and seen the trailer. looks to be one of the better depictions of linguists I’ve seen recently (perhaps despite the errors with the Arabic script!) What was the process like of working with actual linguists on the film? — lebaneselinguist961

That Arabic script bothers the heck out of me, too!

I consulted with a linguist early on, during scripting, and it helped me to round out Louise’s character more in the film. Later on, linguist Jessica Coon came on board to help during production and was a huge help to the process.

While a linguist and a translator are two different vocations, in the film I have Louise straddling both just for the occasional lucrative translation gig, and to explain why she has an SSBI with the US government, which would make her an ideal candidate for this job. — HIGHzurrer

How did you approach the writing process for a film like this? Did the premise and idea of it all seem really daunting? I really enjoyed all of your previous work with horror films and can’t wait to see this. — deedlittle

My prime directive was to capture the way Ted Chiang’s story made me feel when I read it, and transpose that to the screenplay. Of course it felt very daunting — I had committed to telling a cerebral science fiction story with a female lead, tackling linguistic relativity, Bayes’ Theorem, Snell’s Law, etc. I didn’t know if anyone besides me would be as fascinated and emotionally invested in the material as I was with Ted’s story, but I couldn’t get it out of my head or my heart. — HIGHzurrer

For the rest of the AMA with Eric, go here.

To read my 2013 interview with Eric and follow up questions about another one of Eric’s movies Lights Out, go here.

Arrival movie website.