Arrival is één van de beste rauwe science-fiction films dit jaar die gaat over aliens die landen op onze planeet en de mensheid die voor het probleem komen te staan hoe ze moeten communiceren met ze. De prachtige beelden in deze film zijn gemaakt door cinematographer Bradford Young met wie de website Collider een interview had en die ook gelijk vroeg naar de aankomende Han Solo film. Dus reden genoeg om het even te checken.

Yeah, the film is obviously sci-fi and it's dealing with aliens but it's very much a character drama about unpacking grief. So visually speaking...

YOUNG: I like that. I like that, unpacking grief I haven't heard that one yet. That's it, you said it. Unpacking grief that's really very important.

Well in dealing with sci-fi you're dealing with aliens, obviously, but at heart this is a grief drama. So cinematically speaking, what was it like to try and meld those two things together and make it dynamic, make it cinematic but also ensure that you're sticking to these characters and sticking to the drama of it all?

YOUNG: Well I think the film can't go in like four different directions, right? It has layers so it's not monolithic but it has to go in one direction. I think for us it was important to figure out whose perspective the story was from, and that didn't need much figuring out because we realized it's all about Louise (Amy Adams.) Once we established that, everything else sort of fell into place. Once we said this film was about flesh and bone, it's about the human beings in the foreground and our perspective on the aliens is her perspective and our journey is determined by her-our journey as an audience, our journey as a filmmaker is determined by her-that sort of anchored everything and it really helped us make what Denis would call' "dirty sci-fi" or just a film that feels like a regular Tuesday morning when aliens show up. Those things you can't make up; there's no way to show that feeling or create that feeling in the film unless you're anchored in humanity and part of that is reminding us that human beings have agency and their own likeness. When you do that, that sort of really determined how the visual landscape of the film and how we moved that film forward visually. So the science fiction part of it was I think less about the aliens and more about creating mythology within the mundane, and that happened to be lead by aliens and spacecraft. This constant negotiation, this push and pull between the known and the unknown, the us and the other and those are classic science fiction tropes that you really can't divorce yourself from. Those are the shackles of science fiction that you really kind of are willing to keep on. But the other stuff just didn't really apply, like these aliens didn't have two feet and arms, they didn't have guns and blasters-that aspect of the film we didn't really want to make. We're trying to make something different, something slightly more grounded about humanity.