Cats VFX artist describes work on film as almost slavery

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

I hate to kick a film when it's down but 2019's CATS has pretty much been the disaster that keeps on giving. From the reaction to its polarizing first trailer to its scathing reviews to its poor box office to its Razzie win for Worst Picture to the rumored "Butthole Cut" of the film, CATS has been a blunder on  BATTLEFIELD EARTH levels. Now that the film has come and gone and is ready to be discovered by anyone brave enough to seek it out on Blu-Ray, a member of the VFX team is speaking out about the project and it just adds more trash to this dumpster fire.

A VFX source on the film spoke with "The Daily Beast" and they compared their experience as something similar to slavery. The source recalled working 90-hour weeks for months and that some of the team stayed in the office for two or three days at a time, sleeping under their desks. This working environment was allegedly made more unpleasant by director Tom Hooper who, according to the source, had no idea how animation worked but this did not stop him from sending emails to crew members degrading their work. Hooper didn't seem to grasp the process of the work they had to do and when the teams want to show the director any animatics, they'd have to fully render it first because he would call it "garbage." The process usually involves the team showing the director preview renderings that feature the characters without color or texture because this allows the director to judge the motion before hours of work are done to flesh out things such as color, texture & lighting. 

It took the team six months to produce the film's infamous first trailer and from there only four months remained to finish the entire film. Visual Effects supervisors were the only members of the team who met with Hooper and the end of production, the film had burned through multiple supervisors. The source went on to say this about the overall experience:

"It was pure, almost slavery for us, how much work we put into it with no time, and everything was difficult. We were rushed on the project that we'd have no time for anything. So when people say, "Oh, the effects were not good," or the animation's not good, or anything, that's not our fault. We have no time. Six months to do a two-minute trailer and four months to do a film of an hour and a half. My math is pretty good…you could figure that doesn't make sense

The source also goes on to say that Hooper was "horrible", "disrespectful", "demeaning", and "condescending". The source described situations where you would go into a conference room and were not allowed to speak and that Hooper would talk to them like "garbage". While this all sounds unpleasant, this is only the side of the source and, according to "The Daily Beast", they did reach out multiple times to Hooper and distributor Universal Pictures for comment but they did not respond.

Tales of troubled Hollywood productions is nothing new and from what we know about CATS, it would not be at all surprising if this kind of tension was brewing behind the scenes. If you recall, CATS was being completed down to the wire of its premiere so a lot of what the VFX source says does ring true. It sounds like the film needed a miracle to not be a disaster and as we know, miracles were not in the cards for this film.

Do YOU think CATS could've been salvaged? BTW, you can judge this all for yourself because the film that somehow persuaded the likes of Judi Dench, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellen, Taylor Swift, and James Corden to appear in it, is now available to own on Blu-Ray.