Update December 1: Just as soon as they arrived, the images have departed: Paramount asked the illustrator to take them down and they have been removed from this article.
This fall’s hit sci-fi film Arrival could have seen Amy Adams using her Oscar-worthy acting chops to work opposite an entirely different-looking race of visitors from outer space. Concept artist Peter Konig — who in the past has contributed design work to films like Jurassic Park, Starship Troopers, and Cloverfield — was brought on in the early days of the film to help draw up a few concepts for the intelligent extraterrestrials in the film, which ultimately did not play a major part in the final version. “For the creatures, when they brought me on, they were in a stage where [Director Denis] Villeneuve just wanted ideas, lots of ideas,” Konig told Cinemablend. “He sent me photo [references] of stuff he liked, real things he thought had elements that he thought were important — pictures of cuttle fish, squids, microscopic organisms, stuff like that. He also liked horses’ eyes for their very soft and thoughtful qualities and because although they looked familiar they had this other quality of being slightly ‘other’ and alien. They had a sympathetic look, but were a little spooky.” Konig posted the renderings on his website, where you can see a few examples of his vision of “sympathetic and spooky” creatures.
