Jeremy Renner in a GQ interview talked about how one of the best science fiction movies of all time – Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival – affected him when he first saw it.
The interviewer says; “Sometimes you watch a film and you kinda sit with yourself afterwards because it triggers something within you, right? One of those films for me was Arrival. It’s such a beautiful film.”
Renner replies; “It’s funny that you say that. I don’t really watch anything I do, but that’s exactly the feeling I got when I saw it. I didn’t know much about what was going to happen. It was a very, very sparse film and the character was limited in the sense of what we could tell in the story, because it’s such a rug pull.”
Renner continues; “I remember exactly where I saw it, I remember exactly what happened to me. I had to sit and be like; “goddamn, that’s a [bleep] filmmaker.” I walked out and I started weeping in the parking lot. I was just so thrown back by what he (Denis Villeneuve) was able to put together. There’s some CG, there’s a lot of stuff I wouldn’t understand or know, in terms of what the film would look like and how it would actually come together. So, seeing that. Wow, that’s a filmmaker.”
Renner compares the VFX work on Arrival to his experience in the MCU; “I didn’t have to imagine too much. They did have, actually, puppeteers with long poles, just to create the movement (of the aliens) for our eyelines. They would move around and come in and out of those foggy shadows. That was nice, because it was interactive.”
And Renner concludes; “What we do for a living, sometimes the person is not even there, when we have to have a scene with them. Or it’s a tennis ball, or it’s a green screen.”