DEFINITION January 2020

CATS | DRAMA

A fter 8000 performances in London’s West End and over 7000 on New York’s Broadway (and many worldwide productions), it’s time for Cats the movie. There is plenty of precedent for a successful musical to be turned in to a cinematic experience: Oliver! , Chicago , Les Misérables , The Sound of Music , Hairspray , Grease ... there’s a big list. But Cats is different. First, it’s primarily a dance musical and it’s just cats, so you have the anthropomorphic hurdle to cross. And then, how do you stage it? But all these questions were ones already served up back in 1981 when Cats first opened at the New London Theatre and the following year at the Winter

The initial concept for the movie was to bring the world down to the size of cats

references to the meeting, so I made a list of things I thought were good for us to talk about. I knew that the film was set in London’s Soho of the late twenties, early thirties – the idea being that it was the back streets of Soho that hadn’t been redeveloped at the time. I’d seen some concept art that production designer Eve Stewart had done, so I pulled together some references for a rain-soaked, neon- and-gas-lit London street of the time. After reading the script, I also read the original TS Eliot poems and read a little bit about

Garden Theatre on Broadway. Definition talked to cinematographer Chris Ross while he was still grading the 1900 shots from the movie (he was actually balancing Rumpleteazer’s white levels at the time). When asked how he got the job on Cats , Ross recalls: “I had finished a movie called Yesterday for Danny Boyle and, behind the scenes, Danny and Tom [Hooper] had a conversation, and I was invited to meet Tom and have a chat. “One of the things I like to do to trigger conversation is to bring some

JANUARY 2020 | DEF I N I T ION 17

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