The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
Claws Come Out in Cat Person
Director Susanna Fogel and screenwriter Michelle Ashford worried that Kristen Roupenian’s unsettling #MeToo short story was unfilmable, so they decided the best course of action was to make it a full-blown horror movie
Two months before The New Yorker
short story “Cat Person” was published in December 2017, The New York Times
released its exposé on Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual assault and harassment, and a month later a parade of celebrities would wear all black to the Golden Globes, where a Time’s Up lapel pin was a nearmandatory accessory. Some five years later, a movie about that Weinstein story, She Said, has been released (and bombed) in theaters, the Time’s Up organization has turned into a leaderless shell after the organization advised then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo as he was facing a sexual harassment accusation, and “Cat Person” has been made into a movie that will screen at the Sundance Film Festival.
“Cat Person,” the short story, follows Margot, a 20-something college student (played by CODA breakout Emilia Jones in the film), and Robert (Succession’s
“Cousin Greg,” Nicholas Braun), a mid-30s guy, as they stumble through a handful of awkward and questionable encounters — many of which happen via texting — before the would-be relationship culminates in a vitriolic series of texts sent by Robert ending in a single message: “Whore.” In 2017, “Cat Person” was dropped into public consciousness when all interactions between men and women — from the workplace to first dates — were being litigated and, after dealing with decades’ worth of behavior that ranged from inappropriate to felonious, women were coming forward daily with stories of sexual harassment at the hands of powerful men. The story quickly went viral, becoming The New Yorker’s most read short story of all time. Within a week after publishing, writer Kristen Roupenian received a call about the possibility of turning it into a movie.
Recalls Roupenian: “I was living in Michigan, I was a grad student, [“Cat Person”] was my first published story,
and [my agent at the time] was like, ‘Wow, we’ve got the contract from The New Yorker and it’s all great. I think the terms of the film deal could be better.’ And we both were like, but what are the odds [that a film would actually be made]?” Condé Nast Entertainment — the production arm of the publishing empire that owns The New Yorker — reached out about developing the project for screen: “I thought, ‘Go with God, but it feels impossible.’ ”
Screenwriter Michelle Ashford, the creator of Masters of Sex, was approached about adapting. “I was really interested in where the #MeToo conversation was going,” says Ashford. “The first reaction to what was happening, of course, is just rage. There are films that have addressed that. I thought, we’ve got to move beyond just rage because this is an entrenched, intractable issue.”
Told largely via Margot’s interior thoughts, “Cat Person” is not inherently cinematic, and director Susanna Fogel (a TV veteran who co-wrote 2019’s Booksmart and directed the 2019 comedy The Spy Who Dumped Me) didn’t see it as “the most adaptable story.”
The solution? Make a horror movie. With Get Out in mind, Ashford and Fogel decided to focus on the more unsettling elements of the short story (Roupenian had written “Cat Person” as part of a horror anthology). “This is the way to deal with almost every complicated social issue,” Ashford thought after watching Jordan Peele’s social thriller. Indeed, the film plays with the innate fear felt by young women as they date. “Susanna and I talked so much about the moment when the car door automatically locks,” says Ashford. “You think: ‘What am I doing? Why am I here? And who is this person?’ ” The film’s final act, which picks up where the short story leaves off, culminates in the kind of nail-biting, raise-the-stakes sequence that’s traditional to horror-thrillers.
Cat Person was shot over 26 days in
New Jersey in the fall of 2021 and is being repped at Sundance by StudioCanal and UTA. After screening the film for friends and colleagues, Fogel has been told by men that watching Robert bumble his way through his relationship with Margot has made them look back on their own interactions with women.
“Those are my favorite reactions because these are all liberal, feminist guys with cool wives,” says the director. Like the short story, Cat Person the movie deals with hot-button themes of consent and shifting power dynamics, and is sure to spur a lot of discussion at the festival, where it is expected to be one of the top acquisition titles. “I don’t need everyone to like the movie. I don’t need everyone to like the choices that we made,” says Fogel. “But I do want people to talk about it.”