The director of 'Cats' explains the CGI tweaks done to the movie's characters after the trailer backlash
- "Cats" director Tom Hooper talked to Business Insider about the backlash to the movie's trailer.
- People were vocal online about the frightening CGI look of the characters.
- Hooper said the reaction made him tweak the characters so their faces looked more human.
- The director also said before going the visual-effects route for the movie, for six months he tested prosthetics to see if that would be better to do.
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With a current Rotten Tomatoes score of 18%, it's looking like "Cats" is on its way to being one of the worst-reviewed big studio movies of the year. But its troubles were prevalent long before anyone saw the movie.
In July, the first trailer for the movie dropped and instantly caught a lot of backlash as people were strongly against the CGI'd furry look of the characters.
"Cats" director Tom Hooper said it was a seminal moment for a vital element of the movie that went through a lot of trial and error.
"What the trailer reminded me was my original intention, which was to preserve as much of the face as possible," Hooper told Business Insider. "I think, possibly, in some characters in the trailer the original face had gotten a little bit lost under the fur."
The big-screen adaptation of the beloved Andrew Lloyd Webber musical was all done with the actors wearing motion-capture suits and VFX dots put on their faces. The fur was then digitally added onto them in post production.
But for six months, Hooper tried to see if it would be easier, and cheaper, to use prosthetics.
Hooper and the "Cats" producers went out to Legacy Effects, which is Hollywood's leading company in prosthetics. But after spending half a year trying to make it work, they finally decided to go the visual-effects route.
"The difficulty was with full prosthetics you end up losing so much emotion that it's too great a loss," Hooper said. "And also, even if you do that, the ears still can't move so you've gone through all of that trouble but you still need to make CG ears. And the tail. Plus, getting body suits that look like real fur it would be really hard."
The finished product is not vastly different from the first trailer. The characters are still very much a disturbing combination of human and feline. But Hooper hopes what you do see more are the human emotions the actors give when belting out the songs, which was what he always wanted.
"The trailer was a good reminder to stay true to my original plan," he said.
Though he added that the reaction to the trailer was a shocking way to realize it.
"It was an intense focus group of millions of people," he said.