Hello, Jana here,

Amy Adams is not an actress you’d expect to see in the lineup for a movie about aliens minus ‘Man of Steel‘, but that’s exactly the case. The ‘American Hustle‘ star is in talks to star in ‘Story of Your Life‘ a film conversion of a short story by Nebula and Hugo and Locus Award winning author Ted Chiang. ‘Prisoners‘ director Denis Villeneuve is slated to direct from a script written by Eric Heisserer, writer of the remakes of ‘The Thing‘ and ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street‘.

The story’s premise is fairly straight-forward, but leaves a lot of room for embellishment. Alien crafts land around the world, and an expert linguist, to be played by Adams, is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat. As she learns to communicate with the aliens, she begins experiencing vivid flashbacks that become the key to unlocking the greater mystery about the true purpose of their visit. There is obviously a lot of language discussion that involves the aliens’ mother-tongue as either Heptapod A or Heptapod B. According to the source material, their language is math-based and reading the details of it gave me a shooting pain behind my left eye so I gave it up. 

This may put Adams in a little different role than her usual naive characters. It’s a niche that she has carved out for herself and she fits into well. It’s actually refreshing to see an actress put some real depth into a character and not focus on sex appeal alone. Shooting is planned to begin next year. While you’re waiting for this film to drop, you can see Adams a lot quicker in the Tim Burton directed ‘Big Eyes‘ about the painter Margaret Keane and her troubles after her husband claimed credit for her paintings.