Many film-makers have imagined what first contact with aliens might be like, but few have scaled the heights of wonder, awe and imagination achieved by Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, respectively.
Denis Villeneuve comes closer than most with his new film Arrival. The French-Canadian director has a reputation for putting his own twist on established genres, and he doesn't disappoint here.
Set against the backdrop of a world thrown into geopolitical chaos by the appearance of black space ships that hang ominously over nations, Arrival paints a subtle, intimate portrait of a woman, Louise, played by five-time Oscar nominee Amy Adams, experiencing motherhood, bereavement, grief and love.
For Villeneuve, who is now making the much anticipated Blade Runner 2, the movie offered some respite from the darkness of his previous films, including last year's hard-hitting thriller about America's war against drugs, Sicario.
"I did three movies that were quite violent and dark, and with Sicario I said, 'I will go there, because I know after that there's this project,'" he says.
"Arrival has a kind warmth to it, like a kind of light, that I needed as a filmmaker. [I know] I'm not [really] going through this darkness, I'm not [really] going through this violence, but directing it goes into you at some point."
When Adams met Villeneuve to hear his take on the film, she says she was pleased to find that “within this sort of global conflict, he really saw that at the end it is about the emotional journey of Louise”.
To reveal too much about what happens to her character – a linguist tasked with discovering whether the aliens come in peace – would spoil Arrival's mind-bending plot. Suffice it to say that it – and her other new film, Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals – involves themes that 42-year-old Adams says have assumed greater importance in her life since she became a mother.
“I’ve been attracted to roles differently since having my daughter [6-year-old Aviana], “ she says. “And the themes, at least now she’s getting older, that I’m pulled in the direction of are, like, consequences and time.”
The idea of characters making difficult choices with dramatic outcomes “really hits me in the heart”, says Adams, who admits that she worries about how her own choices will influence her child.
Being a successful actress has allowed her to take Aviana around the world but it has also placed her daughter in the public eye, creating “a self-awareness in her that she might not have had, had I chosen something else”, says Adams ruefully.
“Do I continue to make the same choices and create a fate for her that she has no choice over? That’s my new anxiety,” she adds.
Adams seems equally ambivalent about the effects of her chosen career on herself. If travel is a perk of the business, “the worst part is, for me, the vulnerability that it creates,” Adams says.
How does this vulnerability manifest itself?
“Any time you expose yourself emotionally or put yourself out there, it’s then people’s idea, I think, that you volunteered for this, so you should just be able to take criticism,” she says. “But I didn’t feel compelled to tell stories because I embraced someone picking me apart.
“I get that that’s part of the job, so you just move on. But it makes me feel vulnerable, and I don’t like that.”
This unusual honesty informs her acting, her commitment to which gave her stomach problems while playing Louise.
“I think it was just the anxiety of what the character was going through. I think I took that on, a little bit,” she says.
She experienced similar pains making 2013's American Hustle. However in that case it was less to do with the role than with the reportedly "abusive" behaviour of the film's notoriously volatile director, David O Russell.
“We don’t need to go into that,” she says. “But I was skinny for a reason.”
Adams was glad to see the back of the troubled con-woman character she played in that film.
“She was a filthy human,” she says. “She would do anything, she was so desperate. And it’s funny, because desperation is far more scary to me than aliens. Like, human desperation – that is something that terrifies me.”
Louise was an entirely different experience. At the end of the Arrival shoot, Adams says she "wasn't cutting my hair and running away. [Although] I was happy to put some mascara back on, I'll tell you that," she adds with a laugh.
Filming was such a happy experience that the cast and crew hung out and partied in a car park close to where they’d been working, in Montreal, after it wrapped.
“It was weird because it’s the first time [after finishing a film] that it wasn’t like all of a sudden it’s a ghost town,” she says. “Often it’s like, ‘Oh bye, I guess we’re done.’ But it’s like we didn’t want it to end, we’d had such a great time.”
• Arrival is in UAE cinemas from November 24
artslife@thenational.ae
