Following the epic flop “Cats”, director Tom Hopper is looking back at some of his decisions surrounding the film.
In an interview with Vulture, Hooper was simply asked to “explain himself” – and he did!
“Where to start?” he laughs. “Well, it starts with me being 8-years-old and being taken to see ‘Cats’ and falling in love with it.”
But when it comes to the visual effects for his version, Hooper said he considered every possibility before settling on CGI.
“I actually did start by going through a physical prosthetics route because, during my first conversations, visual effects seemed to be so expensive,” he explained. “But the tricky thing with prosthetics is you end up with a kind of full-face prosthetic and you lose all performance. And then you still have nonmoving ears. And then you’re like, ‘So you’re only going to CGI the ears? If you’ve done that, then what’s the point of doing it selectively?’ Then, if you added any kind of fur to bodies, you’d gain a centimetre of weight everywhere, which doesn’t help.”
He added, “So all roads led me back to the visual-effects route.”
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Hooper later tried to explain the scale behind “Cats”, how some things are huge while others are a lot smaller than expected, “If a cat was standing on hind legs, what’s the difference? And it’s about two and a half to one. So everything is built two and a half to one. But then you still end up with a street that’s only as wide as you can make it in the studio — whereas if you’ve applied the two and a half rule, it would be super wide.”
He continued, “But it was never meant to be that literal. Obviously, if we’re cats, the world would be bigger. But it also puts you back in a childlike position because, of course, when you’re a toddler, the table is higher than you are. So it has that trick of perspective. The look on people’s faces when they visited our set was one of childlike wonder.”
“Cats” is in theatres now.
