Loving the Alien: Amy Adams on Arrival
Amy Adams can do it all: sing, dance, and now, in new sci-fi film Arrival, talk to aliens. Here the talented actor tells us about female characterisation and the freedom of this latest role
Some actors have a type. Tom Cruise is the running action man. Tom Hanks is the sweet-hearted guy next door. Clint Eastwood is the laconic cowboy. Who says you need range to be a movie star? Amy Adams, however, has it in spades.
She’s been a live-action Disney princess (Enchanted) and a naive nun (Doubt); a glamour puss con artist (American Hustle) and a hard-as-nails girl from South Boston (The Fighter). As Lois Lane, she’s the most alive element of Zack Snyder’s DC comic movies, despite her role being limited to damsel in distress cliches, while in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, she’s terrifying as the forceful wife of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s eponymous religious leader.
“She can do it all,” said Anderson about Adams when we interviewed him back in 2012. And by all, he means the movie star triple threat: she acts, she sings, she dances. “She's more like an old time actress when they could do everything,” suggests Anderson. “They don’t make them like that so much any more.”
Adams adds another string to her bow with new film Arrival. Directed by en vogue Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve (Sicario, Prisoners), it’s a sombre science fiction film of ideas, filled with jaw-dropping spectacle and spine-tingling set-pieces, but the film’s most potent image of all is Adams' expressive face. She grounds the movie; she gives its chilly sci-fi visuals and grand philosophising a human dimension.
Arrival is an alien invasion movie, but not the kind with which Roland Emmerich is associated. At the beginning of the film, a dozen pairs of aliens have appeared on Earth overnight, arriving in elegant space ships that look like skyscraper-dwarfing grains of rice. The first clue that this movie might be low on bombast is the locations the aliens choose to park their ships: not hovering over the White House, Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower, but in less iconic locales like Siberia, off the coast of mainland China and in rural Montana.
It’s to the latter ship that brilliant linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks is whisked by Forest Whitaker’s no-nonsense Colonel to help establish communications with the extraterrestrials. “You made quick work of those insurgent videos,” he says of Louise’s last freelance translation commission with the US department of defence. “You made quick work of those insurgents,” she replies.
From this tantalising opening, Adams was hooked. “The first five minutes of something usually makes me decide whether or not I’m going to like a script and this one begged me to keep going,” she says, holding court to a group of journalists at London Film Festival ahead of Arrival's UK premiere. “When I got to the end of it I had to go back and read it again, knowing what I knew.”
As well as the alluring story, her character’s intellect was also a big draw. “I think sometimes females are written as if they’re smart but then not given anything smart to do or say!” she says. “So the fact that she gets to be smart, not just act smart, is awesome.”
Louise’s sense of awe on her first encounter with the aliens and her obsession with understanding them – they communicate using inky circles that look like the rings coffee cups leave on napkins – calls to mind Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s a performance of pure empathy and compassion, and Adams knocks it out the park. “I thought it was a great role for her,” Adams co-star, Jeremy Renner, tells us. “It’s roles like Louise that are lacking in Hollywood for actresses of Amy’s caliber; women often just get victim roles” – we turn your attention again to Zack Snyder’s DC comic films. “It’s a fantastic script which shows the leading woman as smart, and as a kind of superhero! She saves the world, and I think that’s just a fantastic thing.”
Adams has some less lofty reasons for enjoying playing Louise too. “One of the things I loved about the role, and it sounds so base, was feeling OK to just roll out of bed in the morning and go to work,” she laughs. “I’ve played roles where I’ve lost my vanity before but this one was different because she was so intelligent, and so imagining this as a woman without vanity was incredibly freeing to me.”
It’s strange to hear Adams say this, given that she is very much the film’s focus; so much meaning is communicated through her close-ups. Despite being a global story told on a grand scale, Villeneuve’s reliance on Adams' face make this feel like his most intimate work yet. Renner gives some interesting insight into the director’s process: “Denis is very Kubrick-like in his style, with his cranes and his shots and his framing. But when he’s shooting, he’s actually very focused on what the actors are doing, on [Adams]’s beautiful face, and what’s going on in her brain.”
"An awe-inspiring sci-fi that delivers both spectacle and smarts" – our review of Arrival
This is the second film on the trot where Denis Villeneuve has sensitively depicted a male-dominated world from a female perspective. In slick crime thriller Sicario we followed Emily Blunt’s FBI agent as she deals with male corruption within a task-force set-up to take down a Mexican drug cartel. Similarly in Arrival, Louise becomes the lone voice of sanity when she has to convince the all-male heads of state of the various territories in which alien ships have landed – including China, Russia and her own government – to steady their trigger fingers while she tries to find out the aliens' intensions here on Earth.
Both films are also slyly critical of America's current political landscape. Arrival is particularly scathing, showing the US government to be paranoid, fearful and, crucially, unwilling to communicate with other nations, particularly Russia and China. US officials are also shown to be terrified of the right-wing media, who are egging the government on to join China on the offensive. Given that it’s being released worldwide a few days after Americans vote on who will be the new Leader of the Free World, it’s tempting to assume Villeneuve had this upcoming election in mind while making the film.
“I don’t think anybody had this election in mind,” counters Adams. “The politics were kind of implied in the script, and because of what’s going on now that kind of pops out of the film. But it’s been a year and three months since we finished filming and the world is a very different place now.”
If Villeneuve didn’t have this current election in mind then he’s been uncannily prophetic. After all, the film’s sly suggestion is that it takes a smart, steadfast woman to temper the US goverment’s macho bullshit and get it talking to the world again. After 8 Nov, this might not sound like science fiction.
Arrival is released 10 Nov by Entertainment One