Amy Adams on Speaking Mandarin

Louise, I am Louise. What is that? Is that a new symbol? I can't tell. Dr. Banks? Hey. What are you doing? Yeah, hi. You need to see me. I'm taking off her headband, too. Dr. Banks. Are you OK? You're risking contamination. You need to see me. Dr. Banks. She's walking towards the screen. That is a rivaling. That's, um, I am worried, though. I worry about giving. I mean, I don't, sometimes I'll ruin the movies by talking about them. It's a hard one to talk about. Like, it always seemed like I didn't know what the movie was about when I was talking about it to people. Yeah, right. But I do. Because either way, everyone gets mad, you know? Yeah. Unless she's caging. You can't say anything. But we did see that was, I mean, that's an alien, obviously. That doesn't ruin it, right? Nope, there's an alien. No, but it's an, it's an unexpected film, so. The script is very clever, though. The way it's presented makes a lot of sense because, again, I don't want to ruin anything, but you play a linguist. Yes. You speak a lot of languages. I do. And they, is it okay to say they come to you? Yeah, yeah, no, I'm the military. I want you to ruin it instead of me, is what I'm saying. You got it. The government comes to me to try to decipher an alien language. I play a doctor of linguistics, a professor who's worked with the government in the past to sort of do translations and decipher different languages. And so they hire me to try to break down this alien language, to try to figure out what their purpose is here. And you, and your character speaks, how many languages? Was that ever determined? I mean, I never really made that. It seems like you speak all of them. Oh, I speak all of them. Just all of them. No, but she, in the film, we see her speak Mandarin, which I don't speak Mandarin. You don't, but you have to do it properly because people who do speak Mandarin will see the movie. Still don't know what I'm talking about. Is that right? I mean, I think they're a little confused. I mean, I thought, you know, I had so much to focus on with this film because when you see the film you'll understand there's just, I have to play a couple things at once and you don't know until you watch it again what I'm, so I thought, okay, two weeks to learn four lines in Mandarin is fine. And then I learned that that's not fine. It is not fine. Not fine at all. And so we got to that scene and it just was like I had nowhere to find it, you know, even though I knew the lines. So Jeremy finally was like, you know, they make Post-its for a reason, Amy. So he suggested I put Post-its around, like, right off camera, which I was like, I'm not going to do that. I'm a serious actress. Cut to, like, take 15. I'm like, Post-its, like, you know. And you wrote it out phonetically? Phonetically, yeah, yeah. Wow. That is very unprofessional. I hope the Academy Awards, I hope the Oscars don't find out about this. I mean, this could be devastating. No, no, no. I think Robert De Niro did the same thing in Goodfellas. He did, like, it's a famous story, he stuck pieces of paper with the lines all around the set. Yeah, I worked with an actor, I won't say who it is, who asked me if I was going to use my teacup and I was like, I don't think so. And he started, like, he printed it out on one of those machines, you know, and it just came printing out and he just pasted it on the back of my teacup. Everyone is going to go home and go through your IMDb and figure out which movie. It wasn't Doubt, because I do have a teacup in Doubt and I can say it wasn't Doubt. It wasn't Doubt. No, it wasn't. Too bad, too bad, it was Meryl Streep. No, it wasn't. Sorry, Meryl. Trump was right. It was not Meryl Streep. Well, congratulations on all the great movies you've been in. Thank you.