'Cat Person' Director on Making That 'Uncomfortable' Sex Scene: 'We Planned Every Minute of It' (Exclusive) (original) (raw)

Director Susanna Fogel's Cat Person centers around an uncomfortable sex scene — but her experience filming the pivotal sequence with stars Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun was the complete opposite.

"The challenge was so clearly that everyone get on board with making something incredibly unbearable to watch," Fogel tells PEOPLE. "The challenge was how do we do this without anyone feeling uncomfortable on the set? So we planned every minute of it."

Cat Person, based on Kristen Roupenian's 2017 viral New Yorker short story, depicts all that goes wrong when college student Margot (Jones, 21) meets the much-older Robert (Braun, 35) while working at a movie theater. Though the pair initially engage in flirty text messages, their up-and-down first date culminates in a rendezvous at Robert's house that Margot quickly realizes she does not want to participate in.

In order for Fogel to plan out the scene, she worked with a storyboard artist based in New Zealand to produce "what looked like a comic book strip version of that scene."

"It was so funny to look at the stick-figure version. It was just inherently really comedic," she says. "That's the way that I introduced Nick and Emilia to what the choreography of the scene would be in this very funny series of panels that lightened the whole conversation."

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

StudioCanal

Those storyboards provided Fogel, Jones and Braun with the ability to "[confront] the awkwardness of the subject matter head on and have really productive and laughter-filled conversations about what we were going to do that day."

"I think that was probably partially nerves and also partly just wanting to really have complete trust," Fogel says. "We got really close in the process of prepping the scene with our intimacy coordinator, who's so smart and also really saw the humor in what we were doing as well."

"It's such a traumatizing scene," the director adds, "but it's so absurd to have four people plotting it out in that way."

The scene in question features Jones's character's struggle to communicate that her boundaries have been crossed. She does not even learn Robert's age until after the encounter, as he questions why she is so eager to leave his home.

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'Cat Person' director Susanna Fogel.

Roger Kisby/Getty Images for Disney

"It was one of our most enjoyable days. It really felt like we'd achieved something in spite of the fact that our experience was so different from a viewer's experience of absorbing it," Fogel says, noting that she ensured Jones would not be nude for the sequence.
"I really needed [the audience] to be trapped in her world of trying to get to the other side of this encounter," she says. "I didn't even want to give them a moment of relief of being able to escape into just looking at a beautiful girl in that male-gaze way that just happens when there's nudity."

Emilia Jones in 'Cat Person'.

StudioCanal

Cat Person proved an internet sensation when The New Yorker first published Roupenian's short story almost five years ago. It came just as the #MeToo movement kicked off "in the height of people starting to talk about issues of consent and people to really talk about the female perspective on things in a different way," as Fogel says.

"I think we've had a lot of films immediately following that initial MeToo moment that were about female revenge and men taking accountability. They told one extreme of the story that was necessary," Fogel explains.

"But now I think people are really craving debating the grayer areas of things because those are most people's experiences. They're less clear-cut and murkier, and there's more to debate in a way, and those debates are really essential if we're going to try to improve this standoff between the genders."

Cat Person is in theaters now.