A Serious Conversation With the Man Who Made <em>Cats</em>

Tom Hooper is very tired. It’s understandable—for the past few months, the Oscar-winning director of films such as The King’s Speech and Les Misérables has been working around the clock on Cats, a visual-effects-laden adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical. In attempting to translate Webber’s somewhat abstract show, itself based on a collection of T. S. Eliot poetry, Hooper leaned on cutting-edge technology that turns his performers into computerized furry humanoids with ears and tails. The end result is at times baffling but oddly transfixing, a genuinely unusual cinema event whether you love it or hate it.

I spoke with Hooper a day after he unveiled the film at its world premiere, in New York, where he told the audience they’d be the first to see it in its finished form. In the end, that turned out not to be true—an updated version of Cats, with even more visual-effects tweaks, was sent to after the movie’s opening day. Hooper and I talked about the intense designprocess, his story changes to Webber’s largely plotless show, and how to capture the ineffable appeal of a singular pop-culture phenomenon. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.