Sims: So it’s a little more mundane.

Heisserer: It is, and there’s a real lack of conflict or tension. And I realized quite soon that if I had this movie take place over a series of nine months to a year of them just talking on TV screens, that I was in trouble. So having the Heptapods arrive [in giant ships] at our front door gave me the geo-political panic element and the rising tension of a public that would want an answer.

Sims: The geo-political panic feels appropriate to this moment in history, where everything has to be immediate, where an answer has to come right away, where there’s an importance placed on speed in everything. The thing that’s working against Louise in the movie is not how the aliens behave, but how the human structures of power are reacting.

Heisserer: Right. And this is the essence of a linguistics expert. A linguist has this essential problem to solve with people, because patience is the only real virtue in that career, and our increasing need for the immediate understanding, the knee-jerk reaction, the false equivalence, all that happens right away, and is our downfall.

Sims: A scene that really stuck out for me was the conversation between Louise and General Sheng. It felt like the lynchpin for the film’s message of understanding and communication, because we’ve only seen him as a stereotypical figure: the stern Chinese general that you see on the TV.

Heisserer: Right! And why? Because we’re seeing it through the filter of the U.S. intelligence network; it’s their version of him. We’re not seeing a person. It’s our misinterpretation of what we think China is doing. So it falls into a bit of a trope, again, simply because we’re the U.S., the military-industrial complex, whatever you want to call it. We’re think of them as a potential enemy. And we’re taking whatever’s being said in Chinese, whoever’s translating that is taking it to the U.S. news and saying, “Oh, this is the big bad general.” No. We don’t know what’s going on with him until we see him in person. We realize he’s not the character we thought him to be: He’s really honored to meet Louise, and something really poetic and personal has happened there.

For the longest time in the script, for the scene where they’re on the phone, I had just written, “She says something in Mandarin to him, and we know this is his wife’s dying words.” And I just found it lovely and poetic, and I didn’t think about it further until [the actor] Tzi Ma calls me and says, “Eric, Eric. What does she say?” And I reply, “Well, she says something in Mandarin!” And he replies, “This is the most important line in the film, this saves the world, Eric! What is the line?” So I kept bringing him ideas, and he would say, “Eric, I love you, but this is terrible.” So finally, I gave him something, and he said, “I deeply love this, this is the line, this is exactly what should be said, I will use this.” And I finally see the final cut of the film, and we get to that scene, and she says the line, and [the director] Denis [Villeneuve], the scoundrel, does not use subtitles. So nobody knows, unless you speak Mandarin, what she says to him.

Sims: So I’m going to have to get a translator? That feels appropriate.

Heisserer: Precisely.

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