Trivia / Arrival

• Approval of God: Ted Chiang, who wrote the novella, loved the film.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Amy Adams agreed to be in Arrival within twenty-four hours of seeing the script.
• California Doubling: The movie takes place in the United States, but was entirely shot in Montreal and different other locations in Denis Villeneuve's native province of Quebec.
• Production Posse: The third collaboration between Denis Villeneuve and composer Jóhann Jóhannsson - after Prisoners and Sicario, and also the last, since Jóhannsson's work on Blade Runner 2049 was not retained and he passed away afterwards.
• Saved from Development Hell: The story was considered unfilmable, and when a production company finally took a chance on it, the screenplay went through years of rewrites til a studio agreed to fund it.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The heptapods were described in the original novel as having barrel-shaped bodies and seven eyes arranged in a ring: however, this was dropped early on in development and many various iterations of the heptapod design were shown in concept art, all emphasizing only their namesake seven limbs and Starfish Aliens aesthetic. Some of the early designs had bioluminescence, or possessd horse-like eyes.
  • An early idea for the end was to have the 'gift' to be a different type of technology given to each nation. The US would get a spaceship capable of faster-than-light travel, China a high-tech version of life support, Japan a device to create water out of thin air, Britain a formula to build a hull immune to cosmic radiation, and Saudi Arabia celestial co-ordinates. It was changed to avoid seeming too similar to Interstellar.
• Working Title: The original title was Story of Your Life, after the short story it's based on. After negative reactions from test audiences, it was changed to Arrival instead.

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