Arrival was released in 2016 and quickly established itself as one of the most intelligent and emotionally resonant science fiction films of the 21st century. Adapted from Ted Chiang’s novella Story of Your Life, the film stars Amy Adams as a linguist recruited by the military to communicate with extraterrestrial visitors, alongside Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker. With eight Oscar nominations, critical acclaim, and a story that rewards repeat viewings, Arrival is a film whose production is every bit as fascinating as what ended up on screen. We’re telling that behind the scenes story now, and you can also hear us discuss the film on our podcast on Spotify and on our website.

1. The screenwriter found the source material through another story

The credited screenwriter on Arrival is Eric Heisserer, adapting Ted Chiang’s novella Story of Your Life. Heisserer started his career as a video game writer before breaking into Hollywood in the mid-2000s, where he’d built a name for himself primarily in the horror genre, writing the A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) remake, Final Destination 5 (2011), the reboot of The Thing (2011), and Lights Out (2016).

It was through another Chiang short story called Understand, about a man who develops superhuman intelligence, that Heisserer discovered Story of Your Life and became obsessed with it. He then had a meeting with Dan Levine and Dan Cohen at 21 Laps Entertainment, a production company looking to collaborate with him. They pitched him ideas for two hours and he said no to all of them. Eventually they asked what he wanted to do, and Heisserer pitched them Story of Your Life.

2. Nobody wanted to buy it without a script

Levine and Cohen read the novella, loved it, and committed to the project. The three of them got Ted Chiang on board and pitched the idea to studios, but nobody was interested. They received some conditional offers, but the suggestions weren’t exactly in keeping with Chiang’s vision. One studio asked if the lead could be changed to a man. Another suggested turning it into an alien invasion movie where, as Heisserer put it, someone punches the alien in the face. Instead, Heisserer went off and wrote the film as a spec script, a screenplay written without a buyer in place.

21 Laps also brought in two other production companies, FilmNation Entertainment and Lavabar Films, to help raise funding. When they pitched the idea and script at the Cannes Film Market in 2014, five studios started a bidding war, which was won by Paramount Pictures.

3. The director was hired because of his previous

Levine and Cohen wanted Denis Villeneuve as director because they’d loved Incendies (2010), his acclaimed French-language drama set in a war-torn Middle Eastern country. They’d had a meeting with Villeneuve where he’d talked about wanting to make a science fiction film, so they sent him Chiang’s novella.

When Villeneuve responded positively, the producers sent Ted Chiang a copy of Incendies and told him this was the person they wanted to adapt his book. Incendies is grounded, artistic, and told with a non-linear narrative, so the connection to Story of Your Life was clear. Chiang said that when he saw the film he realised 21 Laps wanted to do it properly, and that was a key reason he sold them the rights.

4. Heisserer and Villeneuve bonded over philosophy

Eric Heisserer was already involved in the project before Villeneuve and had written drafts of the screenplay. He said the first time he met Villeneuve was at a breakfast meeting where they talked about philosophy, science, and religion for two hours. They did this every week, and after about a month Villeneuve called Heisserer to tell him he’d just signed on to direct the film, declaring: “Now we are married.”

Villeneuve has said that when he’s making a film he’s “a screenwriter’s best friend, and also their worst enemy,” a balance that’s probably exactly what a collaborative process needs.

5. The lead actress accepted the part within days

Villeneuve said that casting Arrival was “the easiest thing in my career because everybody fell in love with the screenplay.” Amy Adams was his first and only choice to play linguist Louise Banks. She’d been planning to take a break from acting to spend time with her five-year-old daughter, but said the Arrival script grabbed her within the first 15 pages. Adams loved that Louise was a mother and an intellectual, and accepted the part within a couple of days, putting her break on hold until after the film. No other name was ever even discussed for the role.

6. Adams trained with a real-life linguist

To prepare for the part of Louise, Adams learned some basic Mandarin, as Louise speaks it at a pivotal moment towards the end of the film. She also spent time with a language expert called Jessica Coon from McGill University in Montreal. Coon helped Adams understand how a linguist would think and act in certain situations, and Adams said the two months she spent learning didn’t even scratch the surface of what Coon knew.

Coon also advised on changing some of Louise’s dialogue and was consulted on the use of whiteboards to communicate with the Heptapods, including how they should annotate the alien logograms. It was all part of Villeneuve’s drive for authenticity.

7. The supporting actor wanted to support Amy Adams

As with Adams, Jeremy Renner was the first person Villeneuve wanted to play the part of theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly. Villeneuve said that he and Renner had met before and been talking about working together, and admitted: “It’s very unusual to cast Jeremy Renner into the role of an intellectual.” Villeneuve noted that Renner was more used to playing action-heavy characters like the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Hawkeye, and would often be jumping around on set to release some energy.

Renner said that when he read the script he knew there wasn’t a huge amount for him to do, but he wanted to work with Adams again after their collaboration on American Hustle (2013). He said: “It was a phenomenal part for Amy and a phenomenal part for a woman. I was interested in supporting her.” Production was even scheduled around Renner’s availability, as he was filming Captain America: Civil War (2016) at the time.

8. Only one man was up to play the Colonel

Villeneuve said he wanted somebody who could bring gravitas to the role of Colonel Weber without having much material to work with, and Forest Whitaker was the only person he ever wanted for the part. The director called him “a master… one of the best actors living today.”

Amy Adams called Whitaker “a beautiful soul” and said that after filming her first scene with him she broke down in tears. Bradford Young, the film’s Director of Photography, reportedly did the same.

9. Another actor consulted the CIA

Antagonist-of-sorts Agent Halpern is played by Michael Stuhlbarg, and Villeneuve cast him after seeing his performance in A Serious Man (2009) by the Coen brothers. To prepare for the role, Stuhlbarg met with a real CIA agent who told him to read a book called Fair Play by ex-CIA officer James Olson, which explored the kind of moral dilemmas operatives have to face.

10. The film streamlined the book

The story of Louise being recruited by Colonel Weber is simplified from what happens in Ted Chiang’s original novella. In the movie, Louise first meets Ian on the helicopter on the way to Montana. In the book, Ian is part of Louise and Weber’s initial university meeting, and Louise’s reasoning for needing to see the Heptapods in person is more scientific: she explains that she doesn’t know if they’re making sounds human ears can’t hear and says they need to use a spectrograph.

A constant difference between the book and film is that the book is more grounded in hard science. Villeneuve shifted the balance of the film to lean more towards the artistic.

11. The alien ship was a functional set

The production designer was Patrice Vermette, who had already worked with Villeneuve on Prisoners (2013), Enemy (2013), and Sicario (2015). The director told Vermette he wanted the inside of the Heptapods’ ship to be created practically rather than digitally. So a real 150-foot-long corridor was constructed that leads into the chamber where Louise and the team meet the aliens, and the chamber itself was built as a real room coming off the corridor with a huge screen.

The whole thing was built 50 feet off the ground, so the cast and crew had to use a scissor lift to get into the set, just as the characters do in the film.

12. The book handled the alien encounter very differently

In the novella, the Heptapods don’t physically come to Earth at all. Ships described as “looking glasses” arrive around the planet, and on these screens the humans can see the Heptapods aboard their own ships. So they’re never in the same location. In the book, the Heptapods also display their language on their own small screens, rather than shooting out the ink circles we see in the film. Both of those changes were significant changes to accommodate the visual medium.

13. An American artist was an inspiration

When designing the inside of the ship, Patrice Vermette said they took influence from James Turrell. Part of the light and space art movement, Turrell is known for creating spaces where he uses light installations to change our perceptions of depth and scale. His work is very minimalist and often features a large, light-filled screen, so the influence on Arrival is clear when you see his work.

Vermette said that he and Villeneuve first came across Turrell’s work when they were making Sicario and said to each other: “When we do a sci-fi movie, we’ll be looking at this guy again.”

14. The ships hover for a reason

The Heptapod ships all float 28 feet above the ground and never actually land on Earth. Vermette said this was a deliberate choice for the film. The idea is that the Heptapods have travelled thousands of light years to get to Earth, but they want humans to make the final move to initiate contact.

Eric Heisserer said that in the original script there was a line where Ian says “they came all this way, why can’t they go another 20 feet?” but it was removed because it sounded like Ian was having a pop at the aliens.

15. The Heptapods took months to design

The concept of seven-limbed aliens called Heptapods comes from the book, though there are some differences. Chiang describes the Heptapods as having a body like a barrel with seven lidless eyes. They were designed for the film by artist Carlos Huante, whom Villeneuve hired after admiring his creature work on Prometheus (2012).

Huante and Villeneuve worked on the Heptapod design for months, taking inspiration from whales and octopuses. Huante produced hundreds of concepts before Villeneuve approved the final, distinctive look we see in the film.

16. The writer’s wife helped crack the language

The Heptapods have two different languages – spoken and written – which is taken from the book: the spoken one is named Heptapod A and the written one is Heptapod B. Chiang describes Heptapod B as being like a geometric pattern, a kind of lattice. The idea of it being the circular logogram we see in the film was Eric Heisserer’s creation when he wrote the screenplay.

Heptapod B is semasiographic, meaning it conveys meaning but doesn’t represent sound the way our written language does. Heisserer said he was struggling to describe what the logogram should look like in the script without it reading like a novel. His wife suggested he just draw it directly into the script, so that’s exactly what he did. Heisserer’s original screenplay had the logograms sketched into it.

17. The logogram was squid ink and coffee rings

The final logogram design of the inky circles we see in the film was created by artist Martine Bertrand, the wife of production designer Patrice Vermette. She said she took inspiration from squids firing ink and the kinds of rings that coffee cups leave on a table.

A father-and-son team of theoretical physics experts, Stephen Wolfram and Christopher Wolfram, served as scientific consultants on the film. They created a “Logogram Bible” containing over 100 words in Heptapod B, 70 of which are used in the movie. And the child drawings we see in the flash-forward scenes of Louise’s tragic child Hannah sketching Louise, Ian, and the Heptapods were illustrated by Martine Bertrand’s son.

18. Amy Adams had a memorable whiteboard mishap

There’s a key moment in the film where Louise writes the big question on the whiteboard that Colonel Weber wants her to ask the aliens: “What is your purpose on Earth?” Adams said she had problems writing on the board and looking away to speak at the same time. Midway through the first take, Villeneuve shouted “Cut!” and Adams realised she’d written “What is your porpoise on Ert?”

The idea for this scene came from the studio. Eric Heisserer said that he’d originally written several scenes where Louise teaches the Heptapods basic English, but in a meeting the studio told him it was too boring. Heisserer stood up and started demonstrating on the board why language has to be taught step by step, and the studio said that what he was doing in the room was a far more interesting way of showing that process than what he’d written. That impromptu demonstration became the basis for those scenes in the finished film.

19. The costume designer created clothing arcs

Villeneuve brought costume designer Renée April on board, having worked with her three times before. He called her “a master at creating character through uniforms.” It was April’s idea to dress Louise more colourfully in the flash-forward scenes and to reflect Louise and Ian’s character arcs by having them gradually shift from civilian clothes to more militaristic outfits as the film progresses.

Louise’s military boots in her final conversation with Costello aboard the ship are a striking contrast to the bare feet we see at the start of the film. The bright orange hazmat suits are another standout: the contrast between that vivid orange and the dark interiors of the alien ships creates a stunning effect. Villeneuve said the hazmat suits were the only element where he asked for something to differ from reality. Normally, the wearer’s face is mostly obscured, but he had the visor redesigned so audiences could see the actors’ full faces.

20. The aliens were named for comedy legends

In the book, Louise names the Heptapods “Flapper” and “Raspberry” because of the noises they make with their spoken language. In the film, Ian suggests the names Abbott and Costello, a reference to the comedy double act Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Their most famous routine, “Who’s on First,” revolves around mixed communication between two people, a fitting nod to the film’s themes of language and misunderstanding.

In the Italian version of the film, however, the distributors were concerned audiences wouldn’t know Abbott and Costello, so the Heptapods were renamed Tom and Jerry. And the Sheena Easton reference, where Ian notes she had a hit in the 1980s in each of the ships’ landing sites, was changed for Italian audiences to Pink Floyd.

21. A deleted scene explains a key moment

A memorable moment comes in the dream sequence where Louise sees a Heptapod in her room. That footage was originally filmed as a conversation between Louise, Ian, and Weber that Villeneuve removed. However, he had to keep elements of it because it was the only scene that mentioned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which provides the theoretical basis for how Louise begins to perceive the future. We’ll come back to that theory shortly, but he adapted it into the shock Heptapod-in-the-corner reveal we get.

22. The explosion used a blend of effects

When rogue soldiers attempt to blow up the alien ship, the resulting explosion was created with a blend of practical and digital effects. Stuntmen were filmed against a blue screen in harness rigs and yanked backwards to create the effect of the gravity shifting around Louise and Ian. The explosion itself was then added digitally in post-production.

23. The film was nearly called something very different

The script was originally called Story of Your Life, matching the novella’s title. When Villeneuve came on board, however, he didn’t like it, feeling it sounded too much like a romantic comedy. The team brainstormed hundreds of alternative titles and, as it turned out, ended up agreeing on the very first one they came up with: Arrival.

This is not to be confused withsci-fi, er, classic The Arrival (1996), in which Charlie Sheen discovers an alien signal and finds out extraterrestrials have been hiding on Earth all along.

24. The book differs from the movie in other ways

Villeneuve’s film is a fairly faithful adaptation of Ted Chiang’s novella, though there are some notable changes beyond the ones already mentioned. In the book, the scientist character is called Gary Donnelly rather than Ian, and he plays a larger role in deciphering the Heptapods’ language. Colonel Weber, meanwhile, has a bigger presence in the film than in the book, where he only appears in a scene at the start and one at the end.

In the novella, 112 Heptapod ships arrive worldwide, rather than the 12 we see in the film. Heisserer said they changed this to reflect the theme of time: 12 hours on a clock, so 12 ships.

25. The biggest change altered the story’s central message

Perhaps the most significant change from the source material concerns Louise and Ian’s daughter Hannah. In the book, she’s never named, and she doesn’t die of a terminal illness as a teenager. Instead, she dies in a rock-climbing accident at the age of 25. One of the reasons the filmmakers changed Hannah’s age was practical: having her die as a young adult would have meant ageing Amy Adams in the flash-forward scenes, which could have given away the twist.

But it’s also a change that subtly shifts the story’s message. A rock-climbing accident is easily preventable (just tell her not to go), and yet in the book Louise still doesn’t try to stop it. The novella leans more towards a statement about the absence of free will. The film, by making the death a terminal illness, something that can’t be prevented, places its emphasis elsewhere: on the choice to embrace love and experience even when you know the pain that comes with it.

26. Villeneuve took the movie global

Also, in the book, the United States military are not in contact with China, Russia, or anybody else around the world like in the film. The book’s narrative is all contained within the Montana base, and there is no threat of world war. The film’s expansion of this into an international crisis was another smart addition, even if we only see glimpses of the worldwide fallout.

27. Louise’s prescience is a real theory

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the theoretical basis for the idea that learning the Heptapod language rewires Louise’s brain, enabling her to perceive the future. It’s a real linguistic theory dating back to the 1920s, developed by linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. It proposes that the language you speak can influence how you perceive and think about things.

In the case of the film, learning Heptapod B, a language in which time is not experienced linearly, fundamentally changes how Louise’s mind works. Ted Chiang’s novella goes further into the science, also referencing Fermat’s Principle of Least Time to explain how the time shifts function. The film takes a lighter touch in comparison, steering clear of extended science lectures.

28. Villeneuve hides the twist in plain sight

The narrative is told out of sequence, and the first and last scenes effectively play one after the other. If all the scenes in the film were arranged chronologically, the shot of Louise walking down the hospital corridor after Hannah’s death would be the final scene. In the film, it’s immediately followed by Louise walking into the university, which would chronologically be the first.

The filmmakers essentially tell us the whole story in the first five minutes of the film. We just don’t know what we’re watching at the time, and we have to learn how to decipher it, which is the same journey Louise goes on in learning Heptapod. It’s a fascinating piece of structural storytelling.

29. The composer started writing before filming began

The score for Arrival was written by Jóhann Jóhannsson, an Icelandic composer working with Villeneuve for the third time, having created the scores for Prisoners and Sicario. Usually, a director will assemble a first cut of the film before handing it to the composer, but Jóhannsson said he started writing and recording the score for Arrival before the movie had even begun shooting. He said that’s how he always worked with Villeneuve.

Jóhannsson sent an iPhone recording of what he was developing a week before filming started as proof of concept, and Villeneuve simply told him it sounded great and to keep going. Working from concept art for the ships and the script, which contained Eric Heisserer’s hand-drawn logogram sketches, Jóhannsson used extensive layering and looping in the music to reflect the circular themes of the story. The soft hums heard throughout the film are actually a piano, but with the initial strike of the key faded out so we never hear the note begin. He was playing with time, much like the film itself.

30. The most recognisable piece cost Jóhannsson an Oscar nomination

The string-laden theme that plays at the start and end of the film wasn’t written by Jóhannsson. It’s called “On the Nature of Daylight” and was composed by Max Richter, a modern classical composer, in 2004. Its prominent use in the film meant that Jóhannsson’s score was ruled ineligible for an Oscar nomination, as Academy rules require original scores to be predominantly new compositions.

Richter’s piece is thematically perfect for the film. Its motif is a run of notes followed by the same notes reversed, making it palindromic, just like parts of the narrative and like Hannah’s name.

31. The Heptapods’ voices were animals and instruments

The sound designer was Sylvain Bellemare, who had worked with Villeneuve on Incendies. He created the sound of the Heptapods by combining birds singing, camels gurgling, and breathing through bagpipes and Maori musical instruments. The distinctive sound of the ships moving was a combination of rolling rocks, wind, earthquakes, and ice breaking, producing a noise like cracking thunder.

32. Villeneuve couldn’t get his first-choice cinematographer

Villeneuve wanted to hire Roger Deakins as Director of Photography, having worked with him on Prisoners and Sicario. However, Deakins was already scheduled to shoot Hail, Caesar! (2016) for the Coen brothers and couldn’t commit. Villeneuve knew he wanted the film to have a strong sense of reality and feel like, as he put it, “this was happening on a bad Tuesday morning, like when you were a kid on the school bus on a rainy day.”

Having liked what Bradford Young had done on dramas like Selma (2014) and A Most Violent Year (2014), Villeneuve hired him as DP. Young described the visual approach they were going for on Arrival as “dirty sci-fi.” For his work, Young became the first African American to be nominated at the Oscars for Best Cinematography.

33. A Scandinavian master influenced the visual style

Young later said that he was influenced by a Swedish photographer called Martina Hoogland Ivanow, specifically an exhibition and book she produced called Speedway. It’s a series of images of speedway riders racing at night, and Young said he was drawn to the lighting of the images. The desaturated tones and natural feel of that work are clearly present in Arrival’s visual palette.

34. The DP shot digitally for a practical reason

The entire film was shot digitally rather than on celluloid. Young said they made that choice because they were often lighting in unconventional ways, and shooting digitally meant they could see what they were getting instantly rather than having to wait for negatives to come back. He also said they would switch lenses frequently, sometimes within the same scene, to create a sense of imperfection, as different lenses have “different personalities.”

35. There’s more digital effects than you might realise

During the first gravity-shifting scene inside the ship, the hazmat suits were added to the actors digitally, as they were strapped into harness rigs and couldn’t wear the bulky outfits. That work was done by Rodeo FX, while Oblique FX handled most of the wide shots of the spaceships, combining CGI with matte paintings.

The Heptapods and ships are obviously digital creations, but some shots are more surprising. An early wide shot of Louise leaving her home to join the mission, walking towards the military helicopter with her home behind her, was shot against a blue screen with the house entirely created in CGI. And the establishing helicopter shot that swirls around the military camp, with all its trucks and tents in view, is also entirely digitally constructed.

36. A real asteroid inspired the look of the ships

Originally, the alien spacecraft were spherical and made of glass (as described in the source material). During pre-production, however, Villeneuve’s research brought him across an image of a real asteroid called 15 Eunomia, located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. He showed it to designer Aaron Morrison, who developed it into the oblong, shell-like design we see in the film. The filmmakers said that because it’s a story about humans, they wanted the spaceships to be subtle and not distract from that. The result is still visually distinctive, just not in a way that competes with the human drama at the story’s centre.

37. The most important words in the film were never in the script

In the film’s climax, Louise uses her new-found ability to perceive the future to call General Shang, played by Tzi Ma. She tells him his wife’s dying words, which he had whispered into Louise’s ear at a future event, and it’s this act that prevents a global war.

Because we never hear the words on screen, Eric Heisserer never actually wrote them. Villeneuve told him: “They’re the most important words in the film, so you have to come up with something.” Villeneuve wanted to keep them a secret, but Heisserer revealed them a couple of years after the film’s release. Louise says to Shang: “In war there are no winners, only widows.”

38. Ian’s nickname for Hannah is a Carl Sagan reference

In the flash-forward scenes towards the end of the film, Ian calls Hannah “Starstuff.” This is a reference to Cosmos, the landmark 1980 documentary series about space presented by astronomer Carl Sagan, in which Sagan famously says: “The nitrogen in our DNA and the calcium in our teeth were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” The line isn’t in the book, making it another thoughtful addition from Heisserer.

39. The ending was changed because of an iconic director

Heisserer’s original script didn’t end with the Heptapods’ language being their gift to humanity. Instead, the gift was the technology to create interstellar travel, with different nations receiving different things: the US got faster-than-light travel, China received an advanced life support machine. Around the time the script was being finalised, however, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) was released. The team felt the space travel angle was now too similar, so it was changed to what we see in the finished film. It feels like the right call: language is what the entire film has been about, after all.

40. The film was a critical darling and a commercial success

Arrival was made for a production budget of $47 million. It grossed $100.5 million domestically and $203.4 million worldwide, making it a tidy profit once marketing costs are factored in.

Critics-wise, it fared very well. Today, on Rotten Tomatoes, Arrival holds a 94% approval rating from critics and 82% from audiences. On IMDb, it sits at 7.9 out of 10. At the Oscars, it was nominated for eight awards, winning one: Best Sound Editing for Sylvain Bellemare.

And you’ve reached the end – 40 huge facts about Arrival, one of the most thoughtful science fiction films of the 21st century. Please share on your social media channels, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for lots of great video content.