‘Cat Person’ the Movie Will Totally Change How You Think About ‘Cat Person’ the Story
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When the New Yorker short story "Cat Person" went absolutely viral in 2017, writer Kristen Roupenian remembers thinking how hard it would be to make it into a movie. "When I sold the story my agent was like, 'I'm going over this agreement, it's very standard. The one thing is the film rights are quite restricted.' And we both had a little laugh about how absurd it was to imagine 'Cat Person'being a movie," she says. The story, which focuses on the internal dialogue of a college student named Margot in the lead up to and aftermath of one really, really awful first date, takes place entirely in that character's head. And the virality of it was, in part, thanks to all the different interpretations of what went wrong between the two main characters.
As you probably know if you're reading this story, the essay was, in fact, optioned for film, and the movie came out this past weekend, six years after the original story. It starts Emilia Jones (CODA) and Nicholas Braun (Succession) as Margot and Robert. In two separate interviews condensed for clarity here, Kristen Roupenian and the film's director, Susanna Fogel, talk about the process of bringing "Cat Person" the essay into Cat Person the movie.
Light warning: This piece digs into questions about consent and sexual "gray areas." If you or a loved one are seeking related support, RAINN's national hotline and online chat are open 24/7.
Susanna, what do you remember about when the essay originally came out? It went so, so viral.
SF: I thought it was amazing that it was in the New Yorker because it's not the kind of story they usually publish. It seemed to be a Rorschach test for people's own shit. People were so passionate about it based clearly on their own experiences, projections, and foibles. It said so much more about the psychology of the person responding than it did about the story.
Kristen, what was it like on your end as the writer?
KR: I learned that my ideal situation as a writer is that I would write a story, I would send it away, I would get an editor being like, Thanks, amazing, I'd get a check, and I would never hear anything again. I'm not good at riding that wave of response.
There was so much conversation around it, but one thing I appreciated was that it really captured the bending over backwards that women have to do when dating men.
SF: If you're not a young woman or if you've never been a young woman, it'd be easy to dismiss the Margot character as a person who is weak in some way. But then you talk to all of your friends who are strong, empowered, educated women who have an incredible sense of self and that is the one area where everybody's like, Yep, I've been there.
When it came to adapting the story into a film, what were some of your fears or hesitations?
KR: The core of the story is what it's like to be alone in your head not knowing what's going on with this other person, with no one else there to corroborate. So the second there are two people with two bodies on screen doing things that a whole theater full of people can look at and assess, it's just a different thing. So the question isn't even if it's an accurate mapping of what happened in the story. They're just fundamentally different forms. The fear I had was that people were going to look at the movie and think that's what really happened in the story. Like now we have the authoritative interpretation of the story.
SF: In the story, it's Margot's perspective, and Robert exists only as a projection of Margot's head. You don't actually have to engage with Robert's interiority in any way because it doesn't exist in the story. But when you're making a movie, you have to actually talk to an actor who's playing the role of Robert and they're asking you questions about why they said or did something and you have to have answers. It's just making him an actual three dimensional person which, in the story, he was really never intended to be that. There's more implied empathy for Robert in the movie than there is in the story because in the story he's not a person and in the movie he is.
There is a lot in the movie that humanizes Robert but I also liked that Margot still doesn't know all that much about him. I was so struck by that final sequence where she finally learns what Robert's job is, after weeks of talking to him.
SF: It's what dating is. You start with this projection, and then as you get real information from real encounters, you start to replace the fantasy with little bites of reality until you have more of a picture of who that person is. But in the movie, they're having sex way before Margot has been able to replace the fiction with the truth.
I feel like there are two types of sex scenes in movies: ones that are wildly unrealistic because the sex is too good to be true, and the other end of the spectrum, which is violent sex. You don't often get really awkward, mediocre sex. Tell me about crafting that scene.
SF: I think post-#MeToo, we got a lot of movies that were revenge stories, stories of accountability, stories about women who have been assaulted, and those stories were really necessary and they're really powerful, but they are also not every woman's story. There are all the in-between stories. So we need the extremes, but we also need stories about the harder-to-identify, middle ground, gray area stuff because that is most people's experience. It can still be complicated and it can still be bad even if it's not an assault.
Margot consents a lot of times in the movie. He asks, Do you want to do this? And she says yes over and over. And even if you notice the expression on her face isn't an enthusiastic yes, she still said yes, and he doesn't really know her and he wasn't looking at her eyes at that one moment. I could see why a man in that situation would be confused. But you can also understand why a woman is not rejecting a six foot seven man in his house in the dark when she doesn't know the way home.
KR: In the written story, during the sex scene it's like, What is really happening? What does he look like? Is he grotesque? A thing that surprised me with the movie is that you look at this tiny person, this actress who is 19, and this very large man with his hands on her throat, and you're like, Oh, that's not ambiguous. It's something you only get when there are two bodies up there on the screen. And then you're like, Oh, wait, maybe this thing I thought was so confusing isn't confusing at all.
I think people are going to have opinions on the ending of the film, especially the moment where the house is on fire and Robert tries to get Margot to come into that crawlspace. How do you want people to feel about Robert walking out of the movie? Do you see that as a redemption moment for him?
SF: In a way, he became the monster that she feared he was and he had that capability the whole time. But also there were certain things she did to manifest that situation. But that doesn't mean that he didn't also do things that were bad and toxic and then micro aggressive or overtly aggressive. They did this dance and they both ended up in this horrible situation that they both had some culpability in and in the end, their most authentic moment is when they're in a survival situation. I didn't want it to be the final referendum on Robert's character. But when you strip away all of the What did you do? What did I do? they're just two human beings who are trying to literally survive.
KR: Robert in my story doesn't get redemption, but that's because Robert in my story is just Robert in my story. Does that character get some kind of redemption in the movie? I mean, I guess. I don't feel like either of them are acting very nobly, right? If it feels like Oh my god, did he do something good? Well, maybe it's potentially true that sometimes-terrible people who have really fucked up and done scary things can then do a thing that seems out of character, and you're like, Wait, I have to revise my whole story of this person.
The majority of people in real life exist in this gray area, right? We do bad things, but that doesn't mean if we were in a burning house with another person, we wouldn't want to save that other person.
SF: I think in dating in particular, we've all had moments where we've been, to a degree, in the Robert role in that most of us can relate to wanting someone that doesn't want us back. And that's so relatable to most people, male and female, but the worst most humiliated you've ever been, you probably did or said something to someone at some point in your life that was cruel. Some of the moments between these two characters get pretty bad. But I also think you see moments in each character where they had a reaction that was inappropriate or toxic, but it came from a place that's relatable.
KR: This person made some really gross decisions around consent and slept with a woman who's young and didn't read her signals, but does that mean he would let her die? I don't think the fact that he didn't let her die in a fire means he was a great boyfriend, but it's complex.
What have been some of your favorite reactions to the film?
KR: There's something new in this movie around that sex scene, and watching something like that up close, and the big visceral feelings that everyone was having in the theater, that does seem new to me. And it's something the story can't give you.
SF: My favorite reactions have actually been from men who are like, progressive feminist men seeing the movie and feeling a twinge of shame about a thing that they said or did one time with a girl even though they're a good guy. In those movies that are about assault, or really violent behavior, it's really easy for most men, unless they're perpetrators of that type of behavior to just write it off, like, Well, that's not me. I don't do that. So this isn't a movie for me. I'm a good guy and that's a movie about a bad guy. And the truth is so much more complicated.
Cat Person is in select theaters now. BUY TICKETS
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