When the New Yorker published a short story titled “Cat Person” in December 2017, writer Kristen Roupenian’s tale of a toxic romance went viral in a way that literary fiction rarely does.
The story of Margo, a 20-year-old college sophomore, and Robert, an awkward 34-year-old man, who have a brief affair involving a few casual encounters and a whole lot of texting, didn’t just tap into the zeitgeist, it crashed right through it.
“I thought it was brilliant and so observant,” says filmmaker Susanna Fogel. “I had no idea who was going to try to make it a good movie, but because I had worked in the entertainment industry I knew someone would.
“Because it was so internal and it felt so resonant, I didn’t know how they would manage to make the movie feel big in scope, and not a small story,” she says.
As fate would have it, the job of figuring all that out eventually fell to Fogel, whose previous work includes co-writing the movie “Booksmart” and directing the first two episodes of the HBO Max series “The Flight Attendant.”
Though to her good fortune, even before Fogel signed onto the project, she says screenwriter Michelle Ashford had found the key to opening up Roupenian’s story.
“When I read Michelle’s script, I was blown away by how she had found a way to make the psychology of the story manifest itself in a genre crossover film,” Fogel says. “I felt it captured the humor but also really immersed you in this sense of danger and panic. The danger and panic of a woman. It kind of forced you to feel those feelings.”
Where the short story fueled online debates about the motives and morals of its two main characters – Was Robert a toxic creep? Was Margot foolishly naive? – the film added a third act that grafts elements of a psychological thriller onto the black comedy of the original.
It stars Emilia Jones, a breakout star in the Oscar-winning film “CODA,” and Nicholas Braun, who as Cousin Greg on HBO’s “Succession” experienced a surge of fame himself. Actors including Geraldine Viswanathan, Hope Davis and Isabella Rossellini fill supporting roles.
“Cat Person” opens in limited theaters on Friday, Oct. 6 before expanding to more on Friday, Oct. 13.
In an interview edited for clarity and length, Fogel talked about the themes that the story in print and on screen explores, the expansion of the story to adapt it as a movie, finding her young stars, and more.
Q: Tell me more about your conversations with Michelle Ashford about the story you wanted to tell.
A: I think part of it is really that in the time between the short story coming out and the movie being made, the culture really did shift a lot. I think Kristen’s story hit right at the height of #MeToo. People had been talking about stories of assault and violence, and then Kristen’s story came out and was a story about a gray area. And it clearly felt like the next installment in that conversation.
Which is to say that there’s so much complexity in these encounters a lot of the time. There are the extremes, but so many more encounters are some horrible middle ground between a great love story and a story about overt violence. Most encounters are like some version of a mediocre, confusing gray area. That’s what we talked about a lot.
Q: You’ve also talked about making the character of Robert more fully formed.
A: In the story, it’s Margot’s perspective. We don’t ever have to account for Robert’s interior life, his motivations, at any point. But when you’re working with an actor playing the role of Robert, you have to answer questions as a filmmaker about why he’s saying things, doing things. I have an actor and I need to give him enough to chew on that he can be authentic, even if the answer I give him never ends up in the movie.
It was a big part of what we needed to shift to make it feel like a dimensional movie. And then we wanted to kind of play out the conclusion of the short story, and said, ‘Then what. Then what happens.’ It’s not an amendment of the story; it’s just the next chapter.
Q: Robert clearly does and says some bad things. But Margot makes some questionable decisions, too. What’s the challenge of working in the gray areas where there isn’t a hero or a villain?
A: It’s really about working with the actors to analyze the subtext of every encounter. Because it’s a movie about two people who are not saying what they think or want. And sometimes they don’t know what they want. The narratives they have in their heads, and sort of the interference of technology, just kind of muddles the story so much that it takes them a long time to come to the conclusion it’s not right.
And by then they’ve been their worst selves and they’ve been pushed to the limits. They haven’t been in each other’s space in a real way but both believe that they have. It’s like a splash of truth, and then a lot of projection.
Q: So much of their initial relationship is built through flurries of texting. Is their miscommunication a result of something uniquely modern like texting or something that people also experienced prior to the invention of cell phones?
A: I think certainly texting gives us a lot more room for miscommunication, but I think that not saying what we want is like a hallmark of being a woman. There’s a lot we’re taught to do or conditioned to do to make sure that we don’t inflame male tempers and egos and all that.
I don’t think it’s only the women who don’t say what they want in this movie, though. I think they both have a lot of unmet desires. We have a long history of not communicating properly even before we had cellphones.
Q: I’m sure all their emojis didn’t help communication either.
A: Emojis equalize everyone into being 13. In a great way. But also they neutralize any nuance.
Q: What made Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun the right actors for Margot and Robert?
A: Emilia was so perfect for it. Physically she has this incredible ability, even though she’s obviously a beautiful ingenue, to feel like somebody who could exist on your college campus or in your friend group. A woman who feels like a real person.
Nick also feels like a person you know. It’s really important to find a guy that men are like, ‘Oh, I love that guy!’ There’s just a certain kind of, ‘Oh, I love that guy’ to Nick that I wanted to have because I didn’t want guys to go in and just instantly be distancing themselves from him. I wanted men to sort of root for Robert enough that they could see themselves in him before he behaves in ways that were problematic.
Q: How much, if any, did you consult with Kristen Roupenian while working on the film?
A: I sought Kristen out before we were officially casting, in the middle of COVID. We’re the same age and we’re both from New England. It kind of felt like we had all of this cultural overlap. I found her on Facebook and reached out and was like, ‘Do you want to do a phone call and just kind of meet?’ And we did, and we became friends.
She was so open and actually not trying to control the process in any way. But it actually felt really good when I felt like I’d made the right choice on something to hear her say, ‘That’s exactly right. That’s exactly that guy. That is what he would wear.’
I wanted it to feel like it delivered the feeling that Kristen wanted the story to capture. And I wanted people to feel the same thing watching the movie that they did reading the story even if there’s different details in there.
So that was important to me, that I was delivering on that, and we weren’t just saying, like, ‘Thank you for the source material,’ and we’re gonna, you know, make a movie about dragons based on ‘Cat Person’ or whatever.
