How I Wrote the Screenplay for “Arrival” and What I Learned Doing It

http://thetalkhouse.com/how-i-wrote-arrival/

by espeed • 10 years ago

351 118 10 years ago

mdorazio• 10 years ago

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.

pacaro2• 10 years ago

My first thought was /^H\documentclass{screenplay}

Edit: fixing my solidus direction.

basyt• 10 years ago

you mean \documentclass{screenplay} :P

Keyframe14• 10 years ago

Why would you need image embedding in screenwriting software? Scrivener would be for prototyping like that.

My primary problem with FD is no support for UTF at all. Real fun writing in other languages. Sometimes even impossible. Fade In saves the day.

SCdF• 10 years ago

Why would you need image embedding in screenwriting software?

For the reason noted in TFA.

wodenokoto• 10 years ago

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?

andrewflnr2• 10 years ago

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.

icelancer• 10 years ago

Same reason that everyone is in love with LaTeX which seems needlessly overly-complicated.

CydeWeys• 10 years ago

Follow-up question to this, why are scripts monospaced in the first place? It is just a historical convention at this point, because they used to be done on typewriters? Or is this just a simple way to handle alignment?

I find dialogue in variable width font easier to read, so I'm wondering if there's really some compelling reason why monospaced is better.

skepticaldrunk12• 10 years ago

From a spec writer perspective, the short answer is that it has hotkeys, formatting based on element type, and autocomplete.

Beyond that, there are versioning tools (screenplay versioning can get a bit esoteric), alternate dialogue capabilities, scene numbering and reporting tools, and a lot more. It also has a lot of capabilities related to production, such as omit functionality, watermarking, script locking, etc.

Final Draft gets bagged on a lot for being expensive and ugly, but it really does have a ton of specialized tools that are incredibly powerful if used correctly.

gallerytungsten• 10 years ago

In addition to the other replies, Final Draft gives you "industry standard" formatting; and easy file interchange within the industry.

smonff• 10 years ago

I find it interesting that the author also mentioned pieces of scrap paper and that some pencil-on-paper have been chosen as illustration for this post: I regret to always conceive things on my computer, because I know that there are special things in the creative process that are easier to drop on a piece of paper than on a file.

But for the final presentation as these codified movie scripts, you better produce something very clear.

moflome2• 10 years ago

Replied to a sub-comment below, reposting... any feedback on how well Amazon's SaaS solution for screenwriting [0] works as a replacement for Final Draft?

[0] https://storywriter.amazon.com

skepticaldrunk12• 10 years ago

I don't have time to check it out right now, as the current project is income-generating, but I'm curious to check it out. On the face of it, it looks like a decent (albeit very simple) screenwriting tool that would be perfect for the amateur or writer/director/producer. One of the things I like about FD is that, as a contract writer, I can define elements (some shows or producers like to format sounds or chyrons or character introductions or whatever) a certain way, so I can write in a manner expedient to me and change the formatting to fit the requirements. This doesn't seem to have that capability, but I could be wrong. It certainly seems like it will get you 90% of the way there, though. I'm guessing they developed this in-house to coincide with their submission system for original content so they can standardize submissions and generate heuristics like wtallis is talking about above.

JBlue42• 10 years ago

I bought Fade In, which is compatible with Final Draft, and much cheaper. Works on all platforms.

http://www.fadeinpro.com/

enjoyitasus• 10 years ago

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

joggery• 10 years ago

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

TeMPOraL4• 10 years ago

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.

notadoc• 10 years ago

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

majewsky• 10 years ago

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

rurban• 10 years ago

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... by Stephen Wolfram who helped with some science parts on the movie.

My short review: https://letterboxd.com/rurban/film/arrival-2016/1/

ravitation4• 10 years ago

It's an interesting "interpretation" of the short story, but it trades a lot of the beautiful ideas for a more generic alien contact story, though the core plot remains the same.

I said it in another comment, but I seemed to enjoy the movie less because I had read the short story.

iandanforth2• 10 years ago

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.

emptybits• 10 years ago

Saw the film last night. If you blacked out, then so did I. (Or else we're already only remembering what the heptapods want us to...)

Like a lot of good sci fi I think this is one of those movies where I'd appreciate a Director's Cut or Extended Edition that includes obscure and technical and deep (read: nerdy) bits cut from wide release.

SeanDav• 10 years ago

The signature scene did not make it to the film I saw, and the whole scene where she writes unaided and which is explained afterwards was a bit lacking. It should have been a pivotal moment, but was too easy to miss the significance of it.

OFC my opinion.

pronoiac• 10 years ago

Huh, I remember reading a comment in this article, from the writer, to the effect that the circular signature didn't make it into the movie, making the blog post something of a director'a cut, but that comment isn't there now.

gommm• 10 years ago

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.

iandanforth2• 10 years ago

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.

pavel_lishin• 10 years ago

Fuck. I was really looking forward to seeing that.

yodon2• 10 years ago

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/

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

photogrammetry2• 10 years ago

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.

yodon2• 10 years ago

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.

nicky0• 10 years ago

It would have been a handy feature for this particular scriptwriter though, wouldn't it.

ttepasse• 10 years ago

Which begs the question: Other countries have different paper formats which throws off the US constraints and still make movies. How does it work in the UK or continental europe?

gwern• 10 years ago

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?

curtis2• 10 years ago

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.

ravitation4• 10 years ago

While I definitely agree, I do think the essence was a little muddled by the alien contact story when compared to the short story.

sanxiyn• 10 years ago

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.

adornedCupcake• 10 years ago

I read the story. I was disappointed since it implied that the aliens knew both past, present and future, while still having a deterministic existence in our universe. Therefore making our universe a specific timeline where everything aligned to make these creatures evolve along time without breaking causality. I have an aversion to both that, and breaking causality. The movie departs from the story, however it appears to keep these elements nonetheless.

musesum3• 10 years ago

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...

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?

wyager3• 10 years ago

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.

musesum3• 10 years ago

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) and Quantum FFTs (https://www.quora.com/How-does-Shors-algorithm-work-in-layma...)

powertower• 10 years ago

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...

wyager3• 10 years ago

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.

ravitation4• 10 years ago

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

ilhank2• 10 years ago

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

grzm2• 10 years ago

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.

superuser22• 10 years ago

[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.

ilhank2• 10 years ago

Manipulative use of a dead child as backstory to build character. Lack of science in general, merely spectacle and CGI. Overly emotional melodrama instead of a real story. Is that good enough for you?

idlewords4• 10 years ago

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...]. 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.

ravitation4• 10 years ago

I disagree extremely strongly.

I thought a lot of the tone, which made the short story so good, was lost, probably due to the medium and the audience. It became much more of a sci-fi alien thriller than a commentary on mortality.

I found that, having read the short story, I enjoyed the movie less than those who had not read it.

GavinMcG2• 10 years ago

Why does that make it better?

idlewords4• 10 years ago

The story is mostly two paper characters exchanging exposition.

Moshe_Silnorin• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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.)

foozed• 10 years ago

I have not read the story yet, so I can't comment on that part. I completely agree about the first half of the movie and that feeling of dread. What brilliant tension!

How I Wrote the Screenplay for “Arrival” and What I Learned Doing It

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