I want to ask you two about the language. How far did you go to develop an actual language for the aliens?
DV: It was quite beautiful because as we were reading the screenplay, there was these beautiful logograms that were quite elegant. But for the movie, I wanted something that was much more nightmarish. Much more complex. And I said to my production designer that I wanted something that was far away from any human languages. It really needs to be something that doesn’t look like it’s coming from our world. Something that we’ve never seen. We did a lot of research and there’s this artist from Montreal who came up with this “coffee stain” idea that would [consist of] organic, nightmarish shapes and I was seduced by the complexity and the darkness of it.
EH: The thing that blew my mind about it is: At the time, we had Stephen Wolfram and his son Christopher, they were consulting to make sure the science was right, and they were using Mathematica, and Christopher became just totally enamored with the amount of work — they actually built a working dictionary with all the elements of the logograms. They had function and there were nested words in there. And so, Christopher built the code that analyzed them and so many of the shots you see in the film, that’s live code analyzing a logogram in real time. That isn’t canned CG.
DV: Yeah it was crazy, there were a lot of experts that took this project very seriously. And a lot of fun, actually, like, linguists and mathematicians came on board and had a lot of fun to find a way to decode this language. In a way, it’s strange to create something very complex and have a team, at the same time, trying to decode what you’re creating.
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Amy, when you’re making a film, like any other film that you’ve done, [it’s] basically moving forward in a linear fashion. And the dialogue Eric wrote for Jeremy Renner’s character, where he’s explaining that this is the way the heptapods think… what was the challenge for you to wrap your head around the fact that you are thinking like them, but still moving forward knowing what’s going to happen?
AA: I think what was helpful — in doing the work for the character — you create a life that you can believe. And hopefully the audience will believe, having gone through the events of the first five minutes, [that they] can go along this journey with her, but then you find out this journey happened in the future and so the character still has to hold up. But the wonderful thing about the experience of Louise the first time around, and the way that I had the opportunity to play her, is, she’s finding out what you’re finding out — when you are finding it out. There’s nothing that she learns before she’s telling you or before we’re shown. So, once you do all that work and have that understanding, it’s really about having a wonderful trust in the screenplay and the director and editor. At that point, you have to let it go. I always feel like if I dive too deeply into the intellectual complexities of this script, I wouldn’t have been able to tap into the emotional truth.
You get to that point in that film when Louise is on the phone, telling the Chinese general what he’s about to tell her, and we don’t know what those words are — or do we, Eric?
EH: You had to bring that one up… [laughs]. I gave myself a little time bomb in the script that I really didn’t think about until it was far, far downfield. There’s a line in the script that’s just “Louise says something in Mandarin to the General.” And I was like, “That’s lovely.” [laughs] And then, it was three months before production and Denis calls me and says, “Eric, what is this line?” And I’m like, “I don’t know.” And he says, “No, no, no, no, there’s a translator here to teach Amy Adams what to say. Eric, this line saves the Earth. This is the most important line in the entire movie, you cannot do this to me!” [laughs] And I was sweating bullets. I started coming up with ideas. The way that Denis worked — and I love you for this, by the way — he does this all in one breath, and it’s unsettling, but it’s also reassuring. He’ll approach you whenever you’re working on something and he’ll say, “You’re a lovely person, you’re a great mind, this is a travesty and an embarrassment.” And you’re like, “Ok… so not that one.” And so you keep working and maybe you’ll get [him to say] “Ok, ok, ok…,” which is [his way of saying], “this is mediocre, maybe this is all I can get from you. I will settle for that.” But Amy and I, [we both go] “No ‘ok, ok, ok’!” And you’ll finally get him to say, “I deeply love this.” And that is like a touchdown, it is like Christmas morning. And so, I got that line and I was so proud, so relieved, and here I am in Toronto for the premiere and I’m next to Ted Chiang and we’re both … just like little kids watching the whole movie. We get to the scene and Denis does not put in subtitles, you clever bastard, you.
DV: No, but the thing is, I think it’s more about language. And I felt…ok, if you’ve noticed, I’m French-Canadian. [laughs] I remember when I was looking at the movies in English, when I was young, I vividly remember saying to myself, “Whoa, that sounded profound.” And I didn’t understand, but I was thinking that the dialogue was very, very wise, very profound and Shakespearean. And later on, when I started to understand English, and I was looking at the same movies again, I was like, “Well, actually it’s not that [intelligent]…” And so I feel it’s more powerful to not know what the General hears, I feel it’s more interesting to try and imagine what he’s saying to her.
Jóhann Jóhannsson composed the score before you started shooting?
DV: Yeah. Music is a very powerful art form. It has a tremendous impact on the images and I’m always afraid of it. I don’t like the idea that the composer would come right at the end, two weeks before the sound mix, would come and apply his music on the movie. I decided to start a more collaborative process where I bring the composer in very early on. Jóhann would read Eric’s screenplay, see the artwork that was done in prep, and start to compose before the shoot. I was shooting the movie listening to some of his tracks already. It was a long process like that where we’d apply his music on the movie, change the edit, then send that edit to him, [he] changes the music — it was like a dance. It’s not a straightforward process. In the end, I like the fact that the music and images are closely married together, organically linked.
Did you shoot sequentially for this movie?
DV: No, it was not shot in sequence, unfortunately, because we didn’t have the luxury to do that. But the good thing about it is that we shot for two weeks with the little one, the daughter (played by Carmela Nossa Guizzo), which was the best way to start this film because we started with the soul and the heart of the movie. And very often the cinematographer, Bradford Young, and I were going back to the dailies from time-to-time to remember the strength of those images. So, we started with the humanity and went into sci-fi after.