Cat Person Director on Making That ‘Uncomfortable’ Sex Scene: ‘We Planned Every Minute of It’ (Exclusive)

Directed by Susanne Fogel cat person focuses on an awkward sex scene – but her experience filming the pivotal sequence with stars Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun was the complete opposite.

“The challenge was so clear that everyone pitched in to create something incredibly unbearable to watch,” Fogel tells PEOPLE. “The challenge was how do you do it without making anyone feel uncomfortable on set? So we planned every minute.”

cat personbased on Kristen Roupenian’s 2017 viral The New Yorker short story, describes everything that goes wrong when student Margot (Jones, 21) meets the much older Robert (Braun, 35) while working in a movie theater. Although the pair initially engage in flirtatious text messages, their tumultuous first date culminates in a meeting at Robert’s house that Margot soon realizes she wants no part of.

In order for Fogel to plan the scene, she worked with a script artist in New Zealand to produce “what looked like a comic book version of that scene”.

“It was so funny to watch the figurine version. It was just inherently comical,” she says. “That’s how I introduced Nick and Emilia to the choreography of the scene in this very funny series of panels that lit up the whole conversation.”

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Emilia Jones (left) and Nicholas Braun (right) in ‘Cat Person’.

StudioCanal

These script boards allowed Fogel, Jones and Braun to “[confront] awkwardness of the topic and we have really productive and laugh-filled conversations about what we’re going to do that day.”

“I think it was probably partly nervousness and partly just wanting to really have complete trust,” says Fogel. “We got really close in the process of setting up the scene with our intimacy coordinator, who is so smart and also really saw the humor in what we were doing.”

“It’s such a traumatizing scene,” adds the director, “but it’s so absurd to have four people planning it in that way.”

The scene in question depicts Jones’ character’s struggle to communicate that her boundaries have been crossed. She doesn’t even find out how old Robert is until after they meet, as he questions why she wants to leave his home so badly.

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Director of the movie ‘Cat Person’ Susanna Fogel.

Roger Kisby/Getty Images for Disney

“It was one of our most enjoyable days. We really felt like we accomplished something despite the fact that our experience was so different from the viewer’s absorption experience,” Fogel says, noting that she made sure Jones wouldn’t be a goal for the sequence.” I really should have [the audience] to be trapped in my own world of trying to get to the other side of this encounter,” she says. “I didn’t want to give them a moment of relief that they could escape into just looking at a beautiful girl in that male gaze that just happens when she’s naked.”

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Emilia Jones in ‘Cat Person’.

StudioCanal

cat person became an internet sensation when she The New Yorker first published Roupenian’s short story nearly five years ago. It came just as the #MeToo movement was “in full swing when people started talking about issues of consent and people really talking about the female perspective on things in a different way,” as Fogel says.

“I think we had a lot of movies right after that initial MeToo moment that were about female revenge and male empowerment. They told one extreme of the story that was necessary,” Fogel explains.

“But now I think people really crave discussions about the grayer areas of things because that’s most people’s experiences. They’re less clear and darker, and in a way there’s more to discuss, and those discussions are really important if I’m going to try to improve this conflict between the sexes .”cat person it’s in theaters now.

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education