Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/765720
horizontal window that opens up to a hazy lake found in her mid-century modern house location. Louise is far closer to the aliens than she would think at first. Another theme from the story that I wanted to explore in the Production Design is circularity. Time is nonlinear in Arrival, there is neither beginning nor end. We all thought ourselves very lucky to find a circular hospital location in which we could subtlety represent this. The birth and death of her daughter Anna there is a turning point in Louise's life experience. This circularity theme is also represented in two other locations: the shape of the auditorium classroom in which Louise teaches, and also in the architecture of the banquet reception hall where Chinese general Shang (Tzi Ma) encounters Louise and reveals to her how she changed the entire course of the first contact with the aliens. Communication is a main theme throughout the screenplay. The circular written language that needed to be created for the film was a big challenge. Again, just like the aliens and their world, we needed a distinct language that might not even be interpreted as a written language at first. We started by researching extinct languages from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Oceania, South and North America. We worked with both linguists and graphic designers. Above: The decontamination tent set on Stage B at Mel's Studio in Montréal. Below, left and right: A production still of the spy tent on Stage C at Mel's Studio. The war room is on one side of this space but, more interestingly, the communication tent is also right next to it. Communications with friends is very close to spying on them, and this shows the hypocrisy of human foreign relations on Earth—the reason the aliens have come to bring us a gift. This was a last-minute idea that Mr. Vermette had: decontaminating the pickup trucks at night with bright lights and sprays of water on the military camp set in Le Bic.