Cat Person Director Susanna Fogel on the Gray Areas of Harrison Ford Movies
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The post Cat Person Director Susanna Fogel on the Gray Areas of Harrison Ford Movies appeared first on Consequence.
Director Susanna Fogel knew that the film Cat Person had the potential to start a conversation about modern relationships, because of the reaction to the source material. The new dark comedy, starring Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun, was adapted from a 2017 New Yorker story by Kristen Roupenian, which became a social media talking point because of its frank depiction of an awkward, potentially boundary-crossing sexual relationship.
“Everybody was connecting to it and projecting their own experiences onto it,” Fogel tells Consequence, “and that’s the story’s true power — that it was so specific, but also became so incredibly universal for people.”
It was the debate that surrounded the story, as much as the story itself, which inspired Fogel’s interest in exploring the material. “That was really interesting to me — like, what is it about this story? What is it about this topic that people are so incensed about? It’s easy to weigh in on a clear case of right and wrong, but with something like this, where it’s just messy and complicated and gray, people have a lot to say. It actually showed a need for more movies that dwell in the gray, because the gray is a lot more common than a black-and-white situation.”
In the film, Jones plays Margot, a 20-year-old college student who meets the much older (and taller) Robert (Braun) through her job at an independent movie theater. A fun and flirty connection via text leads to awkward in-person dating, as Margot discovers that Robert’s expectations for her aren’t in alignment with her own desires — however, she’s just not sure how to tell him that, because as the Margaret Atwood epigram reminds us: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
Explains Fogel, “we’ve had a lot of movies that have been answers to years of sexism, which are, this is a movie about the toxicity of men, the end, or this is a movie about a man who didn’t take no for an answer, the end. And not to dismiss those movies in any way, but they’re not really investigating what the woman could have done differently or what led the man to be the way he is. They’re not really interested in that, and that’s not what they’re there to do. But I think that is the job of this movie, a little bit more.”
Cat Person premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, reawakening that same conversation again. “The only thing that was surprising to me was the fixation on what was different between the story and the film,” Fogel says. “When you’re talking about a novel is one thing, but a short story is a short story. Yeah, we changed things — we added things, because it was short,” she laughs.
One major addition to the film from the original short story was Harrison Ford — not the actor himself (beyond archival clips), but how he represents a certain kind of cool to a certain generation of men, who grew up watching Indiana Jones, Rick Deckhart, and Han Solo grab and kiss ladies (with varying degrees of consent).
“There’s just this version of masculinity that’s canonized, no one really questions it. And it’s not to say that there’s something so sinister about it, it’s just that these pop culture references are so pervasive in forming how these men approach dating. And they don’t always age well,” Fogel says. “It’s just interesting to go back and say, well, in terms of the context of how Robert became the way he was — he’s a person who grew up watching those movies and probably also watched all of those Judd Apatow movies in the aughts, where the man always gets the woman that’s out of his league. That’s like the buy-in of the concept of those movies.”
And that, Fogel says, was interesting to explore in Robert’s case, because “he grew up waiting for his moment to be one of those people, and then was suddenly thrust into a culture that says that, you know, men are toxic and need to shut up and let women have the power, and they’re not going to get any of the things they thought they were going to get. So I think that’s where a lot of that sense of angry entitlement comes from, on the most extreme level in incel culture — that’s not really what our movie is, but that’s all tied to that. The sense of, ‘But I thought I was going to get these things. That’s what I was told.'”
Adds Fogel, “I don’t want us to be making the comment that these movies should be struck from the canon, because they’re great movies. But there are a lot of invisible layers on which this stuff operates.”
Fogel confirms that it wasn’t easy to get approval to use actual clips from The Empire Strikes Back (including Han and Leia’s iconic Millennium Falcon kiss). However, she says, writer Michelle Ashford’s agent was able to call in a personal favor with one of the producers at Lucasfilm. “That was a favor that happened at the highest level,” Fogel adds with a laugh. “I mean, it was impossible. We never thought we would get them.”
Similarly, Robert’s preferred playlists, as heard in the film, primarily feature male artists, and “if you listen to the lyrics, there are some problems with them, but they’re great songs. I’m a progressive person who has all those songs on my Spotify, but if you listen to the lyrics of a Beach Boys song, they’re about 15-year-old girls on the beach. That doesn’t necessarily age well, you know?”
Cat Person (Rialto Pictures)
You know what has aged well? Isabella Rossellini. Fogel confirms that prior to casting the veteran actress as an entomology professor, she was familiar with one of Rossellini’s previous projects, The Sundance Channel’s Green Porno. If you’re not familiar, the short film series featured Rossellini in handmade animal and insect costumes, explaining the mating habits of the praying mantis, duck, and others. If you are familiar, then hearing Rossellini speak with authority about the life cycle of the humble ant will immediately trigger some fond memories.
“I introduced everybody to it because I was obsessed,” Fogel says. “It’s not the reason that she ended up on that cast list, but I was aware of how perfect it was — in particular when we were rehearsing, and she was correcting some of the details in the script about ant mating habits and psychology. She had a lot of notes, but her notes were not normal script notes. They were just notes about the logistics of the ant colony and how the sex works and all of that. She was schooling all of us, and we adjusted it accordingly.”
The film’s release, Fogel says, will hopefully continue the conversation about the issues raised by both the film as well as its source material. “I think a lot of these stories can be so black and white, like the woman is a victim and the man is bad, or the woman is kind of just the omniscient way into the story,” says Fogel. “But I liked how relatable it was, that Margo was a little bit egocentric and self-absorbed in moments. I don’t think that that condemns her character, but it makes her more of a person, and less of a symbol of a certain type of feminist commentary. It’s more interesting to just show her as a specific person that you can relate to — flaws and all.”
Cat Person premieres in theaters on Friday, October 6th.
Cat Person Director Susanna Fogel on the Gray Areas of Harrison Ford Movies
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