[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - The best response you can have to a payoff in a thriller is someone goes, "Oh, right, I forgot, of course..." [multiple voices chattering] [Narrator] On Story offers a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

All of our content is recorded live at Austin Film Festival and our year-round events.

To view previous episodes, visit OnStory.tv.

[projector clicking] [typing] [typewriter ding] [projector dies] [Narrator] On Story is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is On Story .

A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

[paper rips] This week's On Story, screenwriter of the sci-fi hit, Arrival , Eric Heisserer.

- I had devoured about half the book and I had to stop at "Story of Your Life" because it emotionally wrecked me.

Like I had this weird mix of just like feeling uplifted and hopeful and also completely shattered and just put it down and went out and hugged everybody within walking distance and just was like [breathes heavily] and then sat back down and thought, "How can I torture a greater audience with this?"

[paper crumples] [typing] [typewriter ding] [Narrator] In this episode, Eric Heisserer talks about working with director, Denis Villeneuve, and the challenges of writing a cerebral sci-fi story about love and loss.

[typewriter ding] [Female VO] Memory is a strange thing.

It doesn't work like I thought it did.

We are so bound by time, by its order.

- Come to me.

[Female VO] I remember moments in the middle.

- I love you.

- I hate you.

[dramatic music] [crying] [Female VO] And this was the end.

[dramatic music] - Come back to me.

[Female VO] But now I'm not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings.

There are days that define your story beyond your life, like the day they arrived.

- What I love about this opening here is that not only is it beginnings are endings and endings are beginnings but it also kind of conjures up that notion that the past is prologue and so you really set us up to feel that this has happened and now I'm gonna tell you a story.

- I knew that I wanted to make this, first and foremost, a story about Louise and about this relationship to her daughter and that the second tier is the visitation and I also didn't want to build the story as like a Usual Suspects Keyser Söze reveal of aha, now the magic trick.

I wanted to be able to tell the audience the entire story in the first few minutes or in the first couple of pages, at least the emotional part of it, so everyone was on board with that.

- I was wondering, the voiceover seems extremely specific.

It's one of the few times where when I was looking at this, I feel like the words were very, very carefully chosen.

- I did.

I got very specific and made sure that everybody understood why those words were so important.

It's easier when your film is about language and communication to be picky about those things.

I tried to be like that in other movies and they're like, shut up writer.

Calm down, Shakespeare.

I've gotten that from everybody else, but here, especially with the producers, they were very attentive and they were like yeah we get it and they just plugged into it right away and understood what we were trying to accomplish.

[typewriter ding] I had bumped into Ted Chiang online.

A friend sent me a link to a story that was published in its entirety online, a science fiction zine, and it was the story Understand and I devoured that and my mind was blown away.

At the end of it, I thought, "This guy can write, oh my god, what else has he done," and discovered the collection, "Stories of Your Life", on Amazon and I just Instant Buy'ed it, ya know, probably was procrastination for writing on something.

I was just like I'll do this instead, and then a few days later, it shows up at my door and once again, to procrastinate, I was like, "I'll just read a story, I've done a page, that's good," and then a few hours later, I had devoured about half the book, and I had to stop at "Story of Your Life" because it emotionally wrecked me.

I had this weird mix of just like feeling uplifted and hopeful and also completely shattered, and just put it down and went out and hugged everybody within walking distance and just was like [breathes heavily] and then sat back down and thought, "How can I torture a greater audience with this?

How can I infect a bunch of people with this feeling?"

And it was that drive that really continued to sort of fund my desire to make the short into a film, just to capture the feeling and broadcast that to more people.

I've had a bunch of very stressful pitches in my career but none as stressful as like, Ted, I'm gonna, basically I'm gonna take your kid away for a year and he's gonna come back and he's gonna probably learn some curse words and have a different haircut.

[laughs] Please let me have him.

Thankfully, he was like this is interesting.

I don't know if it could be a movie but I'm curious to see if it'll work and he gave me the green light and then off we went.

[typewriter ding] Denis was the most enriching relationship that I've had with a director in my career so far, and he just behaved very differently from anybody else that I'd been in the room with.

I've been so accustomed to getting to a point where a director is attached or thinking about becoming attached and it's a very brief meeting where often the director will get my name wrong, and is like look this is the last time I'm gonna see you maybe before the premiere, so... and then off they go and maybe, in the arbitration, there are four other names on it at that point.

With Denis though, he got interested and everybody, all the independent financiers and my producers were all like, oh my god, prisoners, dude this is a go movie if we get him, and no pressure, Eric, but don't mess this up.

So, we had a breakfast meeting at a little spot near his hotel in Westwood and sat down, and it wasn't a little half hour session at all, it went on for a couple of hours and we just did a deep dive on philosophy and science and religion and geopolitics and would occasionally steer back to the script and he'd have some questions, and at the end of it, we got up, we shook hands.

He says, "Eric, this was nice.

Let's do this next week," [laughter] and I was like, "Sure, okay, yeah, great," and we kept doing that for six or seven weeks, and he inspired me.

He would get me exited about something because I discovered he is a fetishist on process.

He loves kind of getting into how does this really work, and would there be paperwork for them to sign?

Why don't we include a scene with them signing paperwork, and I'm like, no other director would want this, I love that you do, yes, and we just, we reached out to different people in, sort of, that community and in NASA and learned that there's actually an actual protocol in the Pentagon, some binder with a bunch of names on the front of it that we nicknamed the nerd Avengers that would get called in case there was some sort of first contact situation, and we then learned about little details of to make sure that things kept from being irradiated, there would be a strange little shower system for trucks and other vehicles and Denis is like, "I like this.

I deeply love this.

We are going to, this is in the movie, Eric," and it just kept going so I would write pages for him sometimes during this time and I'd come back to him and it was a lovely little show and tell, but every week, my producer's like, "Please, dear God, say he's on board."

"No, but we had a croissant and a mocha "and we talked about politics.

It was great," and he's like, "What the hell are you doing, Eric?"

and then finally after all of that time, I got a call from my agent like, "Holy crap, dude, "it finally worked, he's on board, it's official," and then a minute later, Denis called me himself, and he says, "All right, Eric, now we are married."

[audience laughing] [typewriter ding] [quiet ambience] [quiet ambience] [clinking] - Yeah, that just happened.

[Eric] This is a great example of how collaborating with fellow artists can make your movie better, because in early drafts, I had it sort of a perfunctory entry of they would go into a spherical ship and an iris would be closed behind them and they started just talking to the aliens right away because I had kind of had too much of Ted's story in my system at that point and I also wanted to get right to it but after working with Denis on it, he kept coming back to try and making that much more of a process, much more of an earthly feeling and a long approach and he talked about shifting the gravity and extending out this period of time and before I sat down with him to talk about how to alter the sequence, I was set aside by the financiers that said okay Eric your job is to convince him not to do this because this is going to make the movie longer and more expensive, we don't have budget for what he's talking about so just go in and just defend your script that we love and I sat down with him and I was like, "All right, Denis, gravity, let's do this," [audience laughing] and I was a total saboteur against the financiers and it was in that process when both of us got to the point of Louise first approaching the heptapods after Denis had come up with this amazing stuff of the glow stick and all the stuff of the gravity shift and our one F-bomb in the movie for Renner and then when we got to that moment, I looked at him and I'm like you know, intellectually, she understands what she's there for, intellectually she's been told there are aliens and she's in a space ship but at this point in time, I think the most human reaction would be her to just blank, just go like oh my god I'm standing in front of an extra-terrestrial and just blue screen of death, so he got very excited about the idea of cutting away and just having a break down in the room there and have to come up with another way of doing it, and that led us again to other story ports.

One great idea can unlock others.

It's a great little ripple effect of when she's then in the moment right after that, when poor Ian is throwing up in the trash bin, and she's thinking she's gonna get fired, I said it would be great if Webber says, "You did much better than the last guy."

- Am I fired?

- You did better than the last guy.

- That doesn't make me feel any better.

- And Denis is like, "Yes, we will have someone on medevac go out as she goes in."

I'm like, "Okay, great, let's do this," and then we came back and the financiers are like, "Eric, what did we tell you?

What is this?

"There are four new scenes now."

[typewriter ding] [background ambience] [papers rustling] [Moderator] When did you discover you could use the tools of cinematic language, specifically of flashbacks, to your storytelling advantage?

[Eric] I started with that idea having looked at the way that Ted framed his story, you know, he played with tense and I realized that, to do this, I needed to play with time.

It's such a key element of the way that the story has to unravel, and it's just a matter of making sure that those time fugues, those little moments, made sense in the logic of the film.

In Ted's story, he just drops you right into this process and the entire story goes back and forth very early on before you know that this is coming, and Denis and I both agreed that the way to tell this cinematically is to have it start like a trickle once she started cracking the language and get more and more, I guess, not necessarily get intense, but get more frequent and get longer, and more than anything show her self-awareness of it happening in both timelines instead of just in our present one, so to speak.

- I feel like I'm with Louise or I'm getting sucked out in the timeline in this very lyrical way so, again, can you tell us how you all collaborated to make that work and have it be very visually different and, again, but part of this whole world?

- We had so many really fun and enriching ideas tackling this story and tackling the relationship that Louise had with Hannah and in contextualizing the flashback or flash forward moments but it continued to make the script a little bit longer or sometimes it would just confuse our readers on the financing side because they wouldn't necessarily understand why we are suddenly in a horse ranch and Hannah is petting a horse.

They were like I don't understand so I would insert language there like the line that was there to appease those readers were Louise to Hannah saying, "See?

They're not so different than you or I," and it just came out in another heptapod session so I could help the read tie those things together and then once that went out, I sat down with Denis.

I'm like, "You know you don't need that line.

You got Bradford, I mean, it's gonna be amazing."

He's like, "It's okay.

It's okay," and, sure enough, you end up with something that's very impressionistic and I love the way that they use focus to try and create interesting shapes in that space and how it was an interesting conversation with the visual effects team that does not like stuff out of focus because all their visual effects work then you can't see all the time and energy they put into it, but we needed to do that a lot with the heptapods so that it matched in a lot of the other shapes.

Even in the opening sequence, there was a moment, the reason why we picked little Hannah to have a horse and what not is that when we go out of focus, it looks like she has more lens.

[typewriter ding] - I will never forget what you said.

[dramatic music] You told me my wife's dying words.

[speaking in foreign language] - One of the biggest changes from the short story was to introduce a larger conflict and something that would continue to escalate throughout the film because the short story, in all its poetry, and its emotion and its deep thought, really has no central conflict.

The heptapods sort of deliver TV screens really throughout the world that allow you to remotely talk to them via very expensive Skype call and that stays for about six months until one day they're like okay we're done and then it's gone, and so there's no sense of a looming ship, who knows where they're actually talking from and none of the governments are really at each other's throats so the question was really to find a way to create a possible antagonist in the film and then reveal that they aren't the antagonist in the way that the aliens weren't either.

[dramatic music] ♪ ♪ - The communications blackout from all 12 landing sites continues this evening.

- The possibility of, hold on, we are just hearing.

- I'm being told we are going to cut this report to tell you breaking news.

- Breaking now.

China has called an emergency press conference.

- General Shang, Commander in Chief of the people's Liberation Army, has announced an emergency press conference that China is standing down.

- There was a line that was in there for a while that somebody decided was a little too precious and it was talking about from General Shang's POV, the Americans were the aggressors that were about to ruin this whole thing because they're the ones that blew up a ship or detonated something inside the ship and it was a fascinating way of saying that we all end up vilifying the other country in our, sort of, our national storytelling.

The scene there, though, was incredibly difficult simply because we skirted so close to paradox and I talked a little bit earlier about John Rogers saying that exposition is really, sort of, best done as an argument, and it came to life for me in a conference room in Montreal with two physicists yelling at the top of their lungs about what could and couldn't be done right there and using terms that just went right over my head, but some fascinating ones that I hung on to, like time soup.

I don't know what that is but I'm starting to get hungry, and ultimately we landed on this with a handful of other bits of information that were in this version of this script and that were also shot but didn't always make it to the final film which is a frustrating thing for, actually, for all of us who work so hard to try and make sure that everything was air tight.

You never want to say, "Well, off-screen, we answer that in something that you never saw," because that feels like a bit of a cheat but it did finally work for everybody and the intercutting was something that our editor zeroed in on.

Our early versions of it didn't have it intercut as much and we found it was a much better way to ratchet up the tension and, ultimately, I think all of us were fairly satisfied with the final version of the scene, even though it changed a lot from the earlier versions, and, of course, the movie came out and we got a bunch of one star reviews, like, she saves the world with a phone call?

[grunts] They did not like that.

They really wanted something blown up.

[typewriter ding] - Stick 'em up.

- Are you the sheriff in this here town?

These are my tickle guns and I'm gonna get ya.

- No.

- You want me to chase you?

You better run.

[laughing] - I wrote a bunch of the little scenes with Louise and Hannah first because they were really important to me and I wanted to make sure the emotion was there and so I did a whole bunch of them, far more than I knew I'd ever want in the script, and then by the time we got to the shooting draft, I went back to Denis and I said, "Here's just two more.

"Try and get a little more just in case, see if you have a way to shoot a few more scenes," and that was really the thing that I focused on most.

I knew that if we ever got too deep into the science of the present storyline that was a lot of linguistics and it was a lot of math, a lot of Jeremy Renner scenes that never made it.

Poor Jeremy Renner.

We had so much fun stuff.

He once explained Fermat's principle of least time using a hand sanitizer and a laser pointer.

It was a great scene, and everyone was like, Eric, this is not a TED talk.

[audience laughing] Just get this out, but then the emotional scenes were really important and there were a couple that actually were shot that really couldn't fit into the film simply because you had to be so careful to make sure that the context of it was right, you understood the impetus for why it would go to that moment and what would bring her back out and sometimes it could break the film.

There was a scene that we had that was in the middle for a long time that was an extension of the moment of young Hannah saying, "I hate you," and it was really she was getting grounded to show that a mom and daughter didn't always get along and she's stomping up to her room, the last thing she says to Louise is, "Why don't you just let me live my own life?"

and we stayed on Amy Adams there and it made the most amazing performance because you can see her deciding I'm gonna have you regardless.

That's the moment that she makes the decision knowing what's coming and if you don't know the reveal, you're in the middle of the movie and you see that and you're like, why are they, what the, what was that about, I don't understand, and if you know the reveal, you get to that point and you're like, oh my god, and you're a wreck and you really can't recover from that.

- Did you ever see the heptapod language as the metaphor for you trying to tell this story knowing the end, knowing the beginning and should know the middle but it's really hard to get there?

- My wife was observant enough to point that out several times and, of course, it was when I was the most frustrated.

I was like, "Shut up.

Don't tell me that.

Yes, it's a metaphor I get it," but it was still incredibly frustrating to figure out the midpoint of this film but figuring a way that made sense of how everything could escalate, early on in the development, felt really hard to bite off.

It felt like we were being a bit too arch with geopolitics and, yet, the closer we got to film time, we were like no this feels more like people just don't want to trust each other and of course they would start shutting off communication so it felt a little more real.

It felt good knowing that we could at least stick the landing if we could get there.

[typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching a conversation with Eric Heisserer on On Story .

On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festivals On Story project including the On Story PBS series now streaming online, the On Story radio program and podcast in collaboration with Public Radio International and the On Story book series available on Amazon.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival visit OnStory.tv or AustinFilmFestival.com.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [projector clicking] [typing] [typewriter ding] [projector dies]