Jeremy Renner credited as playing...
Ian Donnelly
- Ian Donnelly: [reading from a book by Louise Banks] "Language is the foundation of civilization. It is the glue that holds a people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict."
- Louise Banks: If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?
- Ian Donnelly: Maybe I'd say what I felt more often. I-I don't know.
- Ian Donnelly: You know I've had my head tilted up to the stars for as long as I can remember. You know what surprised me the most? It wasn't meeting them. It was meeting you.
- Ian Donnelly: [narrating] Like their ship or their bodies, their written language has no forward or backward direction. Linguists call this "nonlinear orthography," which raises the question, "Is this how they think?"
- Ian Donnelly: If you immerse yourself into a foreign language, then you can actually rewire your brain.
- Louise Banks: Yeah, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It's the theory that the language you speak determines how you think and...
- Ian Donnelly: Yeah, it affects how you see everything.
- [last lines]
- Louise Banks: If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?
- Ian Donnelly: Maybe I'd say what I feel more often. But I... I don't know. You know, I've had my head tilted up to the stars for as long as I can remember. You know what surprised me the most? It wasn't meeting them. It was meeting you.
- [they hug]
- Louise Banks: I forgot how good it felt to be held by you.
- Ian Donnelly: You wanna make a baby?
- Louise Banks: Yes. Yeah.
- Ian Donnelly: As I watch you steer us around these communication traps that I didn't even know existed, it's like, "what?" I guess that's why I'm single.
- Louise Banks: Trust me, you can understand communication and still end up single.
- Ian Donnelly: [upon first meeting] Priority one: What do they want and where are they from? And beyond that, how did they get here? Are they capable of faster-than-light travel? I've prepared a list of questions to go over, starting with a series of "handshake" binary sequences...
- Louise Banks: How about we just talk to them before we start throwing math problems at them?
- Colonel Weber: This is why you're both here. I'll bring the coffee...
- Ian Donnelly: Coffee with some aliens...
- Ian Donnelly: [narrating] Why did they park where they did? The world's most decorated experts can't crack that one. The most plausible theory is that they chose places on earth with the lowest incidence of lightning strikes. But there are exceptions. The next most plausible theory is that Sheena Easton had a hit song at each of these sites in 1980. So, we just don't know.
- Louise Banks: [facing the aliens] So, what are we gonna call them?
- Ian Donnelly: I don't know. I was thinking Abbott and Costello.