Cat People
Cat People (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from freefall-productions.com on 02/11/20)
1982 / US / 118 minutes
“You can sense how an animal feels- we’re all connected.”
Director: Paul Schrader / Screenplay: Alan Ormsby, based on the screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen / Director of Photography: John Bailey / Music: Giorgio Moroder & David Bowie / Production: Charles Fries and Jerry Bruckheimer for Universal / Cast: Nastassja Kinski (Irena), Malcolm McDowell (Paul Gallier), John Heard (Oliver Yates), Annette O’Toole (Alice Perrin), Ruby Dee (Female), Frankie Faison (Brandt), John Larroquette (Judson), Ed Begley, Jr. (John Creigh).
In the late ’70’s, Universal Pictures began scouring it’s own archives for ’30’s ’40’s and ’50’s film properties it still held the rights to in order to remake them for modern audiences. The versions of Flash Gordon, The Thing and Scarface that we now consider definitive all directly or indirectly came about from this project but a lesser- known example is Paul Schrader’s Cat People.
Re- imagining the 1942 original as an “Erotic Horror” (could a more ’80’s subgenre be possible?), Schrader’s plan was to try to do everything the older work would have been unable to get away with and mixes sexuality, folklore and incest into a film that could only have come from this time and place.
Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer before he became a major player with Top Gun, Cat People begins with Irena (Nastassja Kinski) arriving in New Orleans to meet her estranged brother, Paul (Malcolm McDowell). Whilst looking round the city Irena, a virgin with a “Weird metabolism” and impressive climbing skills, meets Oliver Yates (John Heard) at the zoo where he works and begins seeing him, much to the disappointment of both Paul and Oliver’s ex, Alice (Annette O’Toole).
Meanwhile, Oliver is enlisted by the police department to help catch a panther that suddenly appeared in a local brothel. The panther’s taken in by the zoo as no one can work out where it came from but it disappears in mysterious circumstances and the police reveal to Oliver that they suspect Paul- who grew up in travelling circuses- is using the cat to murder people.
Finally confronting Paul about all the strange goings on, Irena is told the truth: that she and her brother are descended from an ancient race of “Cat People” who can only mate with their own as sex with others will cause them to transform into panthers, with making a kill the only route back to human form.
Whilst Schrader had been a celebrated screenwriter throughout the ’70’s (most obviously for his work on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull), he’d never received the same acclaim as a director (despite doing the excellent Blue Collar in 1978) so was attracted to Cat People as a chance to do something completely different, although he wasn’t a fan of the original film.
First employing eccentric Italian “Visual Consultant” Ferdinando Scarfiotti to develop the film’s sets and it’s unusual “Salmon and Lime” colour scheme, Schrader then cast McDowell (like Schrader, an ageing addict of almost everything for whom playing an incestuous serial killing panther man probably came as second nature after the likes of If,
A Clockwork Orange and Caligula) and hired composer Giorgio Moroder (who would also provide the Scarface score a year later).
David Bowie was also brought in to work on songs with Moroder (although he couldn’t take an acting role due to his prior commitment to Tony Scott’s similarly themed The Hunger), with the featured theme becoming the brilliant Putting Out Fire. Largely forgotten for decades amongst Bowie’s better known works, the synth heavy, Moroder- produced track was replaced on his Let’s Dance album by a (still great) rock version with Stevie Ray Vaughn on guitar but the original was reintroduced to a wider audience when Tarantino used it in Inglorious Basterds in 2009.
For the role of Irena, Nastassja Kinski was perfect, especially considering her eyes and body were going to be doing a lot of the work (although even she was given a run for her money by Annette O’Toole- who was getting big at the time with memorable supporting roles in Walter Hill’s 48 Hours and in Superman III the following year). It was Kinski that the permanently off his head Schrader began an extremely volatile affair with though, even proposing to her at one point despite already being engaged to his girlfriend of seven years.
Schrader’s approach with Cat People was to subvert audience expectations by presenting the inevitable sex and violence in the most offbeat way possible (“Giving them skin when they’re expecting blood and blood when they’re expecting skin” as he later put it). If anything, the film’s chaotic shoot helped to create it’s heightened, almost delirious mood.
At one point an Assistant Director was sent to retrieve a coked up Schrader from his trailer so some work could be done, only to end up getting on it with him. Eventually, the Second AD was sent in to get them both and disappeared for hours too leaving everyone else standing around unable to shoot anything.
“Everybody on that film was doing drugs except Nastassja” Schrader said in an interview several years later. “When you could get away with doing half a gram on a weekend, it was great fun. But when I moved up to a gram a day, then it wasn’t fun anymore. After writing all night, and finding out the next morning I only had a page and a half, I realised I wasn’t producing. I was having motor problems.
“It got to the point where I couldn’t hit the keys. I got paranoid, I couldn’t focus. The whole balance of life shifted from day to night, the quality of the people in my life was getting scuzzier and scuzzier, darker and darker, until I was dealing with drug dealers and pimps and guns, and it got really ugly. In your forties, you really have to want to be a drug user, because it’s so hard to keep the hours!”
Another major drama hit towards the end of production when Kinski finally packed Schrader in, making the last few days pretty nightmarish for all involved, then did a swift runner to France. Schrader later pursued her to Paris, where she’d already begun her next affair, and told him simply that “I always fuck my directors”!
During the editing, there were further rows about how much of Kinski was now supposed to be shown or not in the final cut. The press also erroneously reported than John Hurt was in the film after someone misheard John Heard’s name (amusingly, Hurt himself tells a story in one of the Alien documentaries about being refused entry into South Africa in the ’70’s when he was mistaken for Heard, who was an anti- apartheid activist).
Cat People opened to mixed response on it’s initial theatrical run but developed a dedicated following in the newly emerging home video afterlife. Still considered something of an oddity among Schrader’s work, audiences now tend to discover it by accident on late night TV or through it’s soundtrack.
Whilst obviously flawed and almost ridiculously a product of it’s time, there are moments of pure brilliance. Irena’s exhilarating point of view night hunt is technically impressive (all accomplished in camera through angles and filters in the pre- CGI era) and Kinski’s intense stare and physicality make it almost impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. In short, her casting was crucial to making the whole thing work and it’s easy to see how an obsessive wreckhead became so obsessed with her.
The sound design is incredible, as is John Bailey’s photography. The real panthers (actually more easily trained leopards dyed black) are magnificent and Ruby Dee has a brief but memorable part as Paul’s loyal assistant, “Female”. Malcolm McDowell delivers insane dialogue in a brilliantly Malcolm McDowell way (“You tell yourself it’s love but it’s blood!”) and the location footage of a New Orleans that largely no longer exists makes it quite a document of social history too.
Critics have got more uncomfortable with Cat People in recent years though, not least because of modern sexual politics and it really all being about female sexual awakening (in, for example, The Company of Wolves it’s more obvious so the backlash actually came at the time).
Whilst nobody’s bothered about the gore (effects supervisor Albert Whitlock’s work) anymore, the levels of sex and nudity are pretty excessive for a supposedly mainstream film. It’s also very weird to hear The Wire’s Frankie Faison speaking with someone else’s voice (for whatever reason, all his dialogue is dubbed by Apocalypse Now’s Albert Hall) but you have to wonder what else Schrader might have done if he was ever trusted with a big budget studio project again.
1982 / US / 118 minutes
“You can sense how an animal feels- we’re all connected.”
Director: Paul Schrader / Screenplay: Alan Ormsby, based on the screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen / Director of Photography: John Bailey / Music: Giorgio Moroder & David Bowie / Production: Charles Fries and Jerry Bruckheimer for Universal / Cast: Nastassja Kinski (Irena), Malcolm McDowell (Paul Gallier), John Heard (Oliver Yates), Annette O’Toole (Alice Perrin), Ruby Dee (Female), Frankie Faison (Brandt), John Larroquette (Judson), Ed Begley, Jr. (John Creigh).
In the late ’70’s, Universal Pictures began scouring it’s own archives for ’30’s ’40’s and ’50’s film properties it still held the rights to in order to remake them for modern audiences. The versions of Flash Gordon, The Thing and Scarface that we now consider definitive all directly or indirectly came about from this project but a lesser- known example is Paul Schrader’s Cat People.
Re- imagining the 1942 original as an “Erotic Horror” (could a more ’80’s subgenre be possible?), Schrader’s plan was to try to do everything the older work would have been unable to get away with and mixes sexuality, folklore and incest into a film that could only have come from this time and place.
Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer before he became a major player with Top Gun, Cat People begins with Irena (Nastassja Kinski) arriving in New Orleans to meet her estranged brother, Paul (Malcolm McDowell). Whilst looking round the city Irena, a virgin with a “Weird metabolism” and impressive climbing skills, meets Oliver Yates (John Heard) at the zoo where he works and begins seeing him, much to the disappointment of both Paul and Oliver’s ex, Alice (Annette O’Toole).
Meanwhile, Oliver is enlisted by the police department to help catch a panther that suddenly appeared in a local brothel. The panther’s taken in by the zoo as no one can work out where it came from but it disappears in mysterious circumstances and the police reveal to Oliver that they suspect Paul- who grew up in travelling circuses- is using the cat to murder people.
Finally confronting Paul about all the strange goings on, Irena is told the truth: that she and her brother are descended from an ancient race of “Cat People” who can only mate with their own as sex with others will cause them to transform into panthers, with making a kill the only route back to human form.
Whilst Schrader had been a celebrated screenwriter throughout the ’70’s (most obviously for his work on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull), he’d never received the same acclaim as a director (despite doing the excellent Blue Collar in 1978) so was attracted to Cat People as a chance to do something completely different, although he wasn’t a fan of the original film.
First employing eccentric Italian “Visual Consultant” Ferdinando Scarfiotti to develop the film’s sets and it’s unusual “Salmon and Lime” colour scheme, Schrader then cast McDowell (like Schrader, an ageing addict of almost everything for whom playing an incestuous serial killing panther man probably came as second nature after the likes of If,
A Clockwork Orange and Caligula) and hired composer Giorgio Moroder (who would also provide the Scarface score a year later).
David Bowie was also brought in to work on songs with Moroder (although he couldn’t take an acting role due to his prior commitment to Tony Scott’s similarly themed The Hunger), with the featured theme becoming the brilliant Putting Out Fire. Largely forgotten for decades amongst Bowie’s better known works, the synth heavy, Moroder- produced track was replaced on his Let’s Dance album by a (still great) rock version with Stevie Ray Vaughn on guitar but the original was reintroduced to a wider audience when Tarantino used it in Inglorious Basterds in 2009.
For the role of Irena, Nastassja Kinski was perfect, especially considering her eyes and body were going to be doing a lot of the work (although even she was given a run for her money by Annette O’Toole- who was getting big at the time with memorable supporting roles in Walter Hill’s 48 Hours and in Superman III the following year). It was Kinski that the permanently off his head Schrader began an extremely volatile affair with though, even proposing to her at one point despite already being engaged to his girlfriend of seven years.
Schrader’s approach with Cat People was to subvert audience expectations by presenting the inevitable sex and violence in the most offbeat way possible (“Giving them skin when they’re expecting blood and blood when they’re expecting skin” as he later put it). If anything, the film’s chaotic shoot helped to create it’s heightened, almost delirious mood.
At one point an Assistant Director was sent to retrieve a coked up Schrader from his trailer so some work could be done, only to end up getting on it with him. Eventually, the Second AD was sent in to get them both and disappeared for hours too leaving everyone else standing around unable to shoot anything.
“Everybody on that film was doing drugs except Nastassja” Schrader said in an interview several years later. “When you could get away with doing half a gram on a weekend, it was great fun. But when I moved up to a gram a day, then it wasn’t fun anymore. After writing all night, and finding out the next morning I only had a page and a half, I realised I wasn’t producing. I was having motor problems.
“It got to the point where I couldn’t hit the keys. I got paranoid, I couldn’t focus. The whole balance of life shifted from day to night, the quality of the people in my life was getting scuzzier and scuzzier, darker and darker, until I was dealing with drug dealers and pimps and guns, and it got really ugly. In your forties, you really have to want to be a drug user, because it’s so hard to keep the hours!”
Another major drama hit towards the end of production when Kinski finally packed Schrader in, making the last few days pretty nightmarish for all involved, then did a swift runner to France. Schrader later pursued her to Paris, where she’d already begun her next affair, and told him simply that “I always fuck my directors”!
During the editing, there were further rows about how much of Kinski was now supposed to be shown or not in the final cut. The press also erroneously reported than John Hurt was in the film after someone misheard John Heard’s name (amusingly, Hurt himself tells a story in one of the Alien documentaries about being refused entry into South Africa in the ’70’s when he was mistaken for Heard, who was an anti- apartheid activist).
Cat People opened to mixed response on it’s initial theatrical run but developed a dedicated following in the newly emerging home video afterlife. Still considered something of an oddity among Schrader’s work, audiences now tend to discover it by accident on late night TV or through it’s soundtrack.
Whilst obviously flawed and almost ridiculously a product of it’s time, there are moments of pure brilliance. Irena’s exhilarating point of view night hunt is technically impressive (all accomplished in camera through angles and filters in the pre- CGI era) and Kinski’s intense stare and physicality make it almost impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. In short, her casting was crucial to making the whole thing work and it’s easy to see how an obsessive wreckhead became so obsessed with her.
The sound design is incredible, as is John Bailey’s photography. The real panthers (actually more easily trained leopards dyed black) are magnificent and Ruby Dee has a brief but memorable part as Paul’s loyal assistant, “Female”. Malcolm McDowell delivers insane dialogue in a brilliantly Malcolm McDowell way (“You tell yourself it’s love but it’s blood!”) and the location footage of a New Orleans that largely no longer exists makes it quite a document of social history too.
Critics have got more uncomfortable with Cat People in recent years though, not least because of modern sexual politics and it really all being about female sexual awakening (in, for example, The Company of Wolves it’s more obvious so the backlash actually came at the time).
Whilst nobody’s bothered about the gore (effects supervisor Albert Whitlock’s work) anymore, the levels of sex and nudity are pretty excessive for a supposedly mainstream film. It’s also very weird to hear The Wire’s Frankie Faison speaking with someone else’s voice (for whatever reason, all his dialogue is dubbed by Apocalypse Now’s Albert Hall) but you have to wonder what else Schrader might have done if he was ever trusted with a big budget studio project again.
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