
How I Wrote the Screenplay for “Arrival” and What I Learned Doing It - espeed
http://thetalkhouse.com/how-i-wrote-arrival/
======
mdorazio
This is a really great analysis of how hard it is to write a really good
screenplay. As an occasional screenwriter myself, it's always frustrating when
producers and directors repeatedly want to dumb down a script or "make it more
exciting" to keep ADD audiences engaged. It's understandable, of course -
traditional genre movies for the masses make more money, and entertainment is
a business. But the fact that Eric Heisserer was able to keep everything in
his screenplay at the intellectual and emotional level that he did really says
something about the passion he had for the source material.

Also, the note about the limitations of screenwriting software is spot on. The
fact that Final Draft costs $250 and can't even support image embedding is
ridiculous.

~~~
wodenokoto
From the outside, movie scripts just looks like mono-spaced text with dialogue
indented.

Can you explain why one would need special software for this? What does Final
Draft give the writer, that word or open office doesn't?

~~~
andrewflnr
Roughly the same reason programmers tend to like IDEs. There are a lot of
conventions around alignment, spacing, capitalization, and probably others
that need to be respected in a screenplay. Specialized software makes it
easier.

~~~
Keyframe
Keeps the format consistent, yes. Also, word completion for characters,
scenes, and other conventions (INT./EXT., DAY/NIGHT/... for slugs). Also,
probably the most important reason, it gives you consistent numbering and
revision system. This is important when doing a production breakdown. think of
it as a reporting tool. There's reporting as well. How many action there is vs
dialogue, how many characters and which in a scene or script, which scenes,
which props per scene (not every tool does that), etc. Some of these reports
are done externally in apps like MMS6 or Gorilla.

You could, and people do, write screenplay in Word or whatever. Trouble arises
later when you need to go through revisions and work with other people that
work in those production-oriented apps. For that reason alone it's better to
do it all in a specialised app.

~~~
kbenson
Seems almost like you could use an IDE with a couple specialized plugins...

~~~
coldtea
Yes, if for some perverse reason you wanted to adopt something that's designed
for something else first and foremost (development in the case of an IDE), and
are able to tolerate all the non-task-specific functionality that results from
that.

Not to mention that lots of popular IDEs are written in unnecessarily
wasteful/slow environments (Eclipse and Idea which use Java, etc).

~~~
kbenson
I'm not sure why you seem to think script development is entirely distinct
from software development. Perhaps you have some insight into this that I
don't, but while there are some obvious differences, I'm willing to bet that a
good IDE that's general purpose enough to work for both a lisp and static
language and support refactoring and syntax highlighting and interface with
external programs like source control would support quite a bit of what's
needed already.

As for implementation language, I'm not sure java is significantly slower in
the case of the project size we are talking about here.

~~~
andrewflnr
I know scripts rely heavily on centering and right alignment. I'm guessing
that's not the only way they depend on the assumption of being printed. There
would be some impedance mismatch in using tools designd for plain text.

~~~
Keyframe
You could write in Fountain syntax [http://fountain.io/](http://fountain.io/)
and have the presentation be printed as intended. I actually tried that once
or twice (short commercial form) in Vim and I didn't have any issues.

------
gwern
I'm surprised he didn't discuss his decision to turn it into a time-travel
story. That's a major alteration to the plot and meaning of the story, and I'm
curious when, why, and how that was made. Did he make it right from the start
when he realized that he'd never be able to explain the stuff about the least-
time principle and Sapir-Whorf and whatnot, or did he try and fail, or did
someone else make him or what?

~~~
curtis
I never thought "Story of Your Life" was an alien contact story. Well, I mean,
it is. I definitely did not see that as the point of the story, though, but
rather as a tool to tell the actual story. In that light, the change to the
alien contact plotline in the movie maybe isn't such a big deal. I was happy
to see that they'd preserved what I thought was the essence of story.

~~~
sanxiyn
Of course Story of Your Life is not an alien contact story. I think what gwern
is saying is not that the film turned an alien contact story to a time travel
story, but the film turned a story with no time travel to a story with time
travel.

Story is very careful that it is just a very different (alien) perspective of
mundane (no time travel) happenings. I haven't seen the film yet, but by all
accounts it includes events requiring time travel (or retrocausation), which
is definitely not the case in the story.

~~~
curtis
I wouldn't describe the movie as involving time travel, but you could make a
case that it involves retrocausation. That's definitely different than the
story, and I don't really regard it as an improvement. I thought the movie was
pretty good anyway, and I think it would have been hard to make a more
faithful adaptation of the story. I'm happy they did as good a job as they
did.

~~~
darkmighty
I haven't read the story, but frankly for me (just watched the movie!) the
time travel aspect was the weakest point. You could assume the 'non-linear
language' just enhanced her predictive capability, but the scene with the
Chinese breaks that possibility; and that ability seems way unbelievable
anyway, even with science fiction suspension of disbelief. I'm not a fan of
time travel/ftl in general with few exceptions.

I would be much happier if she just got incredibly smarter after the
interactions. I can see so many plot possibilities arising from that.

(People start distrusting her; she starts feeling more intimate with the
aliens then humans; etc)

It resembles many programmer's belief that there just may be a 'holy grail
programming language', where translating abstract thoughts into working code
gets much easier, and your thoughts themselves are shaped by the structure of
this language.

It might be arguable that Turing-complete languages in general are the holy
grail, allowing expression of any algorithm into code. But indeed our
productivity has risen so much with modern languages compared to the very
first Turing-complete languages that one does wonder how far from optimal-
human-productivity our languages really are.

The same musings naturally apply for human language of course :)

~~~
GavinMcG
You should read the story. All those other plot possibilities would be even
more serious departures.

Also, the movie didn't bother to really explain this – though it made hints
with the statement about how the heptapods see time, and Hannah's name being
the same forwards as backwards, etc. – but there's no time-travel aspect
_specifically because_ there's no influencing going on at all. She doesn't
cause anything to happen.

------
wyager
I was a little disappointed that they left variational physics out of the
movie (which meant that the physicist character was basically useless in the
movie). I understand that that's a lot harder to make accessible than basic
linguistics, but (spoilers) when they discovered that the aliens only knew
time-independent variational physics, that was one of the biggest "whoa dude"
moments in the book.

~~~
ravitation
It was a little weird that a physicist spent the entire film doing
linguistics.

------
idlewords
It's remarkable how much better this movie was than the story it's based on
[[http://robertomunizdias.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/11/Ted-C...](http://robertomunizdias.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/11/Ted-Chiang-Story-of-Your-Life.pdf)]. In particular,
the story has the main characters encounter their alien interlocutors almost
without anxiety, or fear.

The first half of the movie, on the other hand, conveys the feeling of dread
wonderfully.

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
The story is vastly better than the movie. The movie makes no sense. She's
shown being able to act in the present on future information. This rips the
heart out of the story. First, she is now morally responsible for her
daughter's death, which wasn't the case in the story. More importantly, the
ability to act in the present on future information is basicly a superpower.
She could take over the world, win every lottery and invest that money into
finding a cure for her kid's disease. Instead she lives her life exactly as if
she wasn't able to act in the present on future information. In the story she
experienced all her life simultaneously. She was't able to affect the
timeline. She experienced every moment of her life after she learned Hexapod B
simultaneously, but could no more change her future than you can change your
past.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I think this is something that really worked well in the movie, but takes a
little more consideration after watching it because the movie doesn't really
stop to explain this part:

Heptapod communication, and later on Louise, is performative. Imagine that
you're playing a part in a live theater. You've read the script. You know
what's going to happen next. You have lines to say, and you say them. You
choose to participate in the performance.

It's a really interesting resolution to the argument between free will and
determinism.

In this case, we can infer that, even though Louise knew everything that would
happen, including her daughter's disease, she chose to play her role anyway.
She understood that it was just a smaller part of a much larger, pre-
determined script, and she was content to be an actor in it at all.

For another example of this being hinted at in the movie, Abbott knew exactly
the fate that awaited him. He could have avoided it, but didn't. That was his
role.

It's a metaphysical argument that's deeply unsatisfying to a lot of people.
For a lot of folks, free will means being able to _force change_ as you see
fit -- the Edge of Tomorrow position. But, for a minority of others, free will
and determinism can coexist if you're willing to accept that just because
things can be changed doesn't mean they should be. It's the ultimate form of
stoicism.

(Also not addressed in the movie is the neat question of whether the
heptapods' original decision to interact with humans for the sake of their own
future is part of the script, or if it was an action they took outside of the
script for their own sake.)

------
iandanforth
Did I black out or did the circle signature not make it into the movie? I
remember the line about dreams and not being fit, but I don't remember seeing
that image.

~~~
gommm
It didn't make it in the movie. The scene stopped after Louise saying "That
doesn't make me unfit for the job".

I actually think the circle signature shouldn't have been cut because without
it, I felt that the entire scene fell a bit flat.

~~~
iandanforth
OK, good. I totally agree. That line would have made a lot more sense, and
helped clarify that section of the movie a lot had they left the signature in.

------
powertower
Stephen Wolfram worked on the language design (logograms) and wrote a lengthy
post about it and making everything scientifically plausible -
[http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-
the-a...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-alien-
spacecraft-work/)

------
musesum
A side benefit of the movie was that it prompted me to read Ted Chiang's story
again. The first time, I had skipped past the bit about Variational Calculus.
Now, I'm intrigued by Fermat's Calculus of Variations.
[http://www.askamathematician.com/2011/08/q-why-does-light-
ch...](http://www.askamathematician.com/2011/08/q-why-does-light-choose-the-
path-of-least-time/)

I wonder: given that a Photon travels at the speed of light, then everything
happens instantaneously, from its point of view. So, is choosing the path that
takes the shortest time like a standing wave?

~~~
wyager
> So, is choosing the path that takes the shortest time like a standing wave?

Note that photons don't take the shortest path; they take a variationally
stationary path (not necessarily the shortest one). My suspicion is that this
is because all the possible photon states are coherent along and immediately
nearby that path, whereas if the path is not variationally stationary then it
interferes with nearby paths. I've done very little variationally physics,
however, so take this with a grain of salt.

~~~
musesum
> My suspicion is that this is because all the possible photon states are
> coherent along and immediately nearby that path

Well, am new to the subject, so not sure what this means. Am curious if there
is any relationship between Fermat's principle of least time
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat's_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat's_principle))
and Quantum FFTs ([https://www.quora.com/How-does-Shors-algorithm-work-in-
layma...](https://www.quora.com/How-does-Shors-algorithm-work-in-laymans-
terms))

~~~
wyager
My thought is that, on a variationally stationary path, all nearby paths are
of the same length. So if you have a photon leaving a point along many
possible paths, near the variationally stationary path the waveforms of the
photon at each path will be lined up, interfering constructively. On the other
hand, if the path is not variationally stationary, the waveform will drift out
of phase on nearby paths (because they have different lengths) until the waves
interfere with each other.

I don't know enough about quantum FFTs to know if there is an analogy.
However, I'm taking Aaronson's class next semester so I'll be able to tell you
in a few months ;)

------
joggery
I like because it gives due credit to Chiang. Painfully modest though he may
be, this enterprise sprang out of his imagination.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Unlike The Martian, in case of which one likely wouldn't even know about Andy
Weir if one hadn't heard of the book before.

------
yodon
I may get pounded for this, but I believe the implied request for image
embedding in screenwriting software in this article is an example of a
reasonable customer request that should not be implemented (or at least should
not be implemented in the way the customer thinks they want).

Screenwriting software is ridiculously constrained. Margin sizes, line sizes,
font sizes, font weights, everything, is ridiculously locked down. In the
physical world, there were (are?) equally ridiculous constraints on things as
minor as the binding of the scripts (which is to be done with brass "brads"
[0]). It's absurd and absolutely intentional because it's what the real,
ultimate customers of the screenwriting software want.

The real customers of the screenwriting software are the people who read and
ultimately buy the scripts, and they want all these constraints in place.
99.99% of all screenplays never get bought, and 99.9999% of purchased
screenplays never make it into theaters as a film [1]. In that sort of
environment, the top goal of every screenplay buyer is to avoid wasting their
time on screenplays that aren't worth reading.

If you send your genius script to people in Hollywood set in Helvetica or Gil
Sans or whatever other font you favor, it will not get read. Period. That's an
absolute deal killer for potential buyers. The reasons are a mix of process
(constraining margins, font size, line spacing, font keening, etc. makes
documents instantly comparable - look at the page count and you know the
running time) and sociology (filmmaking is an incredibly complex and expensive
multi-player art form with each project involving hundreds of people working
together to build a product for millions or hundreds of millions of consumers,
and the person considering buying your script wants to know do you understand
how that works well enough for your idea to have a chance of surviving).

It's kind of like the way I put a footnote reference in my first paragraph
starting with [0] instead of [1] or * the way the rest of the world would have
if they wanted to put a footnote in plain text like this, it's an early visual
cue that I might be a writer who gets how HN works. Ditto for the [1] footnote
around the obviously made up, quantitatively inaccurate but qualitatively
accurate stats on screenplays (the WGA does occasionally publish stats on the
number of people who earn a "full time salary" writing screenplays and the
numbers are amazingly depressingly small).

It doesn't matter how great your idea is, or how unique your personal creative
vision is. If you put pictures in your screenplay, you are putting a giant
HTML <blink> tag in your script that screams to every serious reader "My
screenplay isn't worth your time to read, because I don't know what I'm
doing." It's all well and good to be a special snowflake in your own mind, but
if you want to be taken seriously in an incredibly sophisticated multi billion
dollar industry where >99% of screenwriters never produce a script that gets
produced, you distinguish yourself not by showing you know how to use blink
tags but by showing you know how to grab people's hearts without them.

If you are a writer and you must have visuals, keep it to a single page,
called a one sheet, with a single powerful evocative image on it to help the
people you pitch to remember the concept for your story (and then try not to
use or show it). Directors are buying your script, not your visuals.

When you're ready to produce and/or direct your own screenplay, then you can
assemble your own visuals, but you still want to keep them out of the
screenplay. Put them first in a mood board that conveys the feel of the story
without the constraints of the script. Then put them in storyboards that
convey the visual telling of the story at a high level (initially) to
facilitate a deeper conversation with all the parties involved in the effort.
Then produce a story reel, communicating the feel and pacing of the story. Or
ditch them all and just make the film. The choice is yours if you are a
producer/director but it's theirs if you are a writer. This is a big, complex,
sophisticated industry you're working in. It's not always going to be
optimized for you or your needs because it's optimized for the total needs of
the set of all players in the industry.

All of which means please don't put images or blink tags in your screenplays
and please don't put image embedding tools in your screenwriting software
unless you want the people using your software to fail at their ultimate goal
of having their screenplays made into actual films.

[0] [https://www.writersstore.com/screenplay-
fasteners/](https://www.writersstore.com/screenplay-fasteners/)

[1] we'll come back to this in a moment

~~~
photogrammetry
Impressive. You are technically correct, with respect to the current
screenwriting requirements.

Unfortunately, you come across as highly antagonistic to a screenwriter (a)
whose script was almost immediately made into a brilliant, popular film [73]
and (b) whose story was foundationally about the way language affects our
thinking.

Your main argument is that people's scripts will get rejected if they don't
chain them into a box and use peculiar little brass fasteners to hold them
together. This inclines me to believe that you've not yet actually seen
"Arrival."

Sometimes I think a little change in the film industry would be productive, if
it meant we'd get more movies like "Arrival," even if it means breaking rules,
and fewer movies like "Captain America: Civil War," who follow the rules but
composite dozens of mismatched absurdities and are basically mass-market
children's cartoons.

[73] Common knowledge. By the way, championing your knowledge of "how HN
works" WRT references just sounds self-congratulatory.

~~~
yodon
Thanks, I think, and I totally don't mean to come across as antagonistic
towards the author - I loved his film, he faced huge challenges, and
understood how to break the formatting norms slightly while staying within
them to get a very exceptional project made. My concern was more that on a
place like HN we'd have a dozen smart folks start googling screenwriting
software, discover a few open source projects, and become convinced their path
to success as app developers was to ship the first screenwriting software with
image embedding support included. That seems like a great idea on the surface
and it's only when you go deeper into the surrounding infrastructure that you
discover why it might actually not be such a great idea as one edge case
customer report might suggest.

The bit about the footnote styles was more to help HN readers who are not
screenplay experts validate an example from their world where formatting
styles communicate in-group vs out-group status, because as you point out
"everyone" knows footnote counters start at 0 on HN.

~~~
photogrammetry
Point about someone pursuing the project is fair. Worthwhile to note that
discouraging people from doing things sometimes has the opposite effect :)

------
notadoc
I enjoyed Story Of Your Life, will have to watch Arrival when it makes it onto
a streaming service.

~~~
majewsky
I would recommend you watch it in a theater (if it's still showing where you
live), if only for the spectacular soundtrack.

~~~
rurban
I enjoyed the movie even more than the original short story "Story Of Your
Life". Which is very rare. "Arrival" is not perfect, but very good.

A very good intro is also [http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-
might-the-a...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-
alien-spacecraft-work/) by Stephen Wolfram who helped with some science parts
on the movie.

My short review:
[https://letterboxd.com/rurban/film/arrival-2016/1/](https://letterboxd.com/rurban/film/arrival-2016/1/)

~~~
musesum
Thanks for the link. Mentioned elsewhere that Wolfram's software was used live
in filming to analyze the semagraphs. But, I missed the Wolfram blog post. Am
going to see the movie again particularly for that sequence (plus the Jóhann
Jóhannsson soundtrack floors me).

~~~
mos_basik
There was a HN discussion of that blog post, as well:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364)

Also I'll chime in about the soundtrack; I loved it. Lucky me Google Play
Music has it - it says I've listened to it about 9-10 times through so far.

------
enjoyitasus
Great article on perverance and prototying, getting feedback and knowing how
to challenge conventional processes.

------
ilhank
This was not a good movie or story, so I don't care.

~~~
grzm
You care enough to make a dismissive unsubstantive comment. Do you have
specific critiques of the movie or story that might contribute to the
discussion? I've heard a lot of positive comments. I'd like to hear a
constructive dissenting view.

~~~
superuser2
[Warning: Spoiler] The most direct criticism I have is that it's a slightly
modified Contact with Interstellar's visual style and time-travel plot twist.

~~~
grzm
Thanks. Lots of stories are mash-ups or retellings. Sometimes a great
production of a classic, well-known tale is a critical success. Is your
criticism that it's not wholly original? Did you enjoy the film?

~~~
superuser2
[Spoilers for Arrival, Contact, and Interstellar]

Forget aliens for a moment. Contact is a retelling of one of the oldest
stories on record: the plight of the faithful. (Wo)man encounters awe-inspring
supernatural force, tells the world but can't prove it, gets dismissed as a
fraud/crazy, but goes on knowing in her heart that her experience was real.
The rest is implementation details.

Putting a scientist in the role of prophet, and getting buy-in from science-y,
atheist audiences by using aliens instead of God (you don't know that they're
a God metaphor until you're on Jodie Foster's side), are precisely the kinds
of intentional inversions that make adaptations of classic tales great.
Present the message differently, using different tools, to appeal to different
people in different ways.

In theater, Anais Mitchell's _Hadestown_ takes Orpehus and Eurydice, sets it
in 20s Appalachia, and expands a story about a hero into a story about the
industrialized world: Orpheus and Eruydice's light, playful hearts are nature
and beauty and song, while Hades is heavy industry, the coal mines, the Man,
the capitalist machine. Also gives it some awesome music.

Sarah Ruhl's feminist _Eurydice_ , from the same myth, subverts a story of a
man's heroics in (trying to) rescue his damsel in distress, and transfers the
agency to the damsel. These are both, in my mind, highly successful
retellings.

Interstellar certainly has components that you'll find elsewhere - what story
doesn't? - but none of them that I can place are a huge part of its identity.
I wouldn't classify it as a retelling.

Arrival directly copies the setup of Contact: aliens make contact, we
ingeniously decode their communication, the message is a blueprint/schematic
for something that might be a weapon. Then it concatenates on the ending of
Interstellar: time is non-linear, it can be transcended by the power of
(love|language). It is neither faithful to nor a clever inversion of either
story. It just takes half a plot from one movie, half a plot from another, and
puts a different bridge in between them.

I had a good time in the theater, I'd probably see it again, I just don't have
as much respect for the story as I did for either Contact or Interstellar
individually. The linguistics were an _interesting_ value add, just not _that_
powerful.

