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Seldom is the structure of language at the heart of a Hollywood movie. That promises to be the case, though, with Arrival, directed by Quebec’s Denis Villeneuve, which premièred to high acclaim at the Venice Film Festival in September and which opens in theatres on Nov. 11. The main character in Arrival is Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist played by Amy Adams, who has to find a way to communicate with aliens whose language is like nothing we can easily imagine. Much of Arrival was filmed in Montreal in the summer of 2015, and it benefited from the expertise of three linguistics professors at McGill University.

In putting together the unearthly sounds of the alien language, and creating the spectrograms for its sound files, the filmmakers consulted Morgan Sonderegger, an expert in phonetics. In building the workspace of the lead character, the set designers drew heavily on the real-life office of Lisa deMena Travis. And in revising and finalizing the script, they consulted Jessica Coon, a Canada Research Chair in syntax and indigenous languages; she has worked with the speakers of Mayan languages in southern Mexico and Mi’kmaq in the Gaspé. One day she lunched with Amy Adams in a restaurant in Old Montreal. “She had a lot of great questions,” Coon recalls now, “like ‘What is it like to do fieldwork?’ and ‘What is it like to be a woman in academia?’ ”