Eve Stewart

Eve Stewart is responsible for the Production Design on the 2019 Movie of Cats.

The Look and Scale of Cats, Explained. Interview, Vanity Fair
Cats production designer Eve Stewart takes us behind the scenes of Tom Hooper’s adaptation. By Julie Miller, December 19, 2019

Production designer Eve Stewart (Les Misérables) remembers seeing the original production of Cats in the West End in 1981.

“It was so strange but mesmerizing,” Stewart told Vanity Fair of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s wonderfully nonsensical, T.S. Eliot–inspired musical sensation. “I’m hoping that the film is the same.“

Nearly 40 years after being mesmerized by Mr. Mistoffelees and Rumpleteazer onstage, Stewart had the daunting task of creating an entire, practical world for Tom Hooper’s ambitious Cats adaptation, out in theaters Friday. The movie whisks audiences into the world of Victoria (Francesca Hayward), Macavity (Idris Elba), and Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench). Because Hooper was committed to filming live performances from his actors and dancers—whose cat-ness was later enhanced with CGI—Stewart had to create sets huge enough to make the human actors seem, well, cat-sized, and sturdy enough to withstand dozens of performers dancing and jumping on them.

Stewart’s first order of business was figuring out the scale of the set, given that it would be seen from the cats’ point of view. “The first month, I was working up in Wales and I would carry up huge bits of cardboard and paper and put 20-foot doors on walls and windows and try to work out the scale. I was trying to pin them up on a windy balcony in a Welsh hotel and it was blowing everywhere. We decided on a scale of 2.5,” Stewart said. “It was based on the fact that, if you stood a cat on its hind legs, it’s only three quarters the size of a human.” But that number “didn’t work across the board because some things looked good at 2.5 bigger and some things didn’t. We kept having to adapt all the sizes.” Stewart said, per production notes, “For example, the chairs had to be three times their normal size to give the cats something to jump up onto. But we quickly learned that certain things, such as bricks, didn’t look realistic at that scale. It was an ongoing process of adjusting every small detail until it was just right.”

The scale also changed depending on which cat Stewart was designing for.

“Some of them were much bigger than the rest—like Macavity was much bigger. And Victoria was teeny weeny.” Because James Corden’s Bustopher Jones and Rebel Wilson’s Jennyanydots were supposed to be larger than the other cats, Stewart’s team designed those cats’ sets on a slightly smaller scale—so the felines looked larger than the furniture around them. “We had to make things that were only twice the size,” said Stewart, whose production team created everything down to the cakes, bread, scones, knives, forks, and table. (If audiences sense something familiar about Jennyanydots’s kitchen, it’s likely because Stewart designed the set with a “checkerboard floor and a bit of yellow” as a way to “doff my cap to Tom and Jerry my favorite cartoon ever.”) “Every single surface in that kitchen had to be super reinforced so that human beings could sing and dance and leap on it without hurting themselves,” said Stewart. “All the jars were plastic so they didn’t break. Cakes were foam. It was just making sure that I wouldn’t kill anyone, basically.”

Stewart decided to set the film’s backdrops in late 1930s London, the era when T.S. Eliot published his poetry collection, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, on which Cats is based. Stewart and Hooper—who collaborated on the 2005 television miniseries Elizabeth I—referred to the poetry collection for direction on the look of each particular cat as well.

“The T.S. Eliot poem has some illustrations in them and they’re incredibly clear about what each cat should look like,” said Stewart. “Because I paint very well, Tom would talk to me about each cat and I would paint it for him.”

In the film, the cats appear as human-feline hybrids—with human faces and cat embellishments, like CGI fur and whiskers.

Stewart said the filmmakers workshopped all kinds of combinations of human and feline features, including “cat whisker-y full-on cat noses.” Ultimately, though, Hooper opted to keep the human faces unobscured by prosthetics or other cat-like features because audiences want to see the actors underneath. (What’s the point of casting Taylor Swift as Bombalurina if you can’t see her face?)

The cats also have human hands and fingers—not that Hooper didn’t consider superimposing paws in postproduction. “We looked at paws on people but they looked really clumsy,” admitted Stewart. “Because it’s a musical full of dancers you need that kind of hand expression…that kind of elongation of the limbs. It looked really weird if you just blobbed on paws.”

Another head-scratching detail about Cats is that some characters have costumes while others don’t. Stewart explained that Judi Dench’s character Old Deuteronomy was given a full-length fur coat for practical reasons—Hooper respected Dench, the 85-year-old theater icon, enough to not make her appear on set in only a skimpy CGI leotard. “She’s a lady,” Stewart said of the modest and glam costume designed by Paco Delgado. “Give her some dignity.”

Other costumes were more whimsical flourishes. Macavity’s hat and coat were inspired by the clothing worn by London gangsters of the 1930s called “Spivs.” And the tuxedo worn by Mr. Mistoffelees—the magician of the cat bunch—was inspired by a magician’s poster she saw plastered on the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. “The poster had a cat that he dressed up in a tiny tuxedo,” said Stewart.

Laughing, she later explained of the beloved Cats universe, “There’s limited logic. But I completely take my hat off and celebrate the nonlogic.”