Six years after The New Yorker published Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person,” the conversation about desire, power, consent, and gender dynamics in relationships is still as contentious as ever. Now, a film adaptation helmed by director Susanna Fogel has entered the chat.
Cat Person, which drops in theaters on October 6, follows 20-year-old college sophomore Margot (brilliantly played by Coda breakout star Emilia Jones) as she enters a romance with 34-year-old Robert (Succession’s Nicholas Braun). Much like the original short story, the film explores the ways digital platforms interfere with how we present our own and interpret others’ identities, and how gender expectations not only complicate that but also crack open an irreconcilable gap between our behavior and our actual feelings. But, unlike the story, Cat Person the film forges past the boundaries of the original ending—in which Robert spams Margot with increasingly aggressive texts that concludes with one searing word, revealing his true colors at last.
Of Michelle Ashford’s adapted screenplay, Fogel explains, “It was an opportunity to add a chapter in the story, not to upend the impact of what that text message said, but to say, ‘Okay, and then what happens if there’s another episode where you run into the person who sent you that message? Then what?’”
Bazaar has the exclusive first look at Margot and Robert’s pivotal first encounter, which you can watch below.
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Ahead, Roupenian and Fogel talk about imagining beyond Cat Person’s original ending, exploring the “mixed-genre experience” of womanhood, and leaning into discomfort.
Kristen, I know you originally conceived of “Cat Person” as part of a larger collection of horror stories, which eventually became your debut book, You Know You Want This.
Kristen Roupenian: That’s right. One thing that’s always been funny about “Cat Person” is that people read it in a context that was so much different than I had initially imagined when I wrote it, namely a story full of murder and supernatural visions and ghosts. Margot doesn’t know what kind of story she’s in. She’s like, “Am I in a story where I could get murdered, or am I in a story where he could be a literal cat person, or am I in a story where the stakes are New Yorker realism?” Now, there’s a movie in which she has to ask that question all over again, and the rules are once again very different.
Susanna, would you say that the horror aspect was something you picked up on while initially reading “Cat Person”?
Susanna Fogel: I remember being really excited that The New Yorker was publishing something that centered a young woman’s story, emotions, and the complexity of a seemingly banal sexual encounter, because it’s not the kind of thing that usually gets dignified with that type of platform. And it should be—we could have a whole other Zoom about that. But, I remember reading it at first and thinking, This is so perfectly observed. This is so brilliantly written. Where is this going? As I tried to figure out where it was going alongside Margot trying to figure out where it was going, I started to get this horrible pit in my stomach of dread, which sounds like it’s what Kristen wanted. I left the story feeling very differently than I felt when I started it. That’s what we tried to capture in the movie, too. As Kristen said, it’s like the movie tries to make Margot and you question, Am I in a rom-com? Am I a final girl? What’s happening?
Kristen Roupenian
How does speaking with the story’s original writer inform that moviemaking process?
SF: I reached out to Kristen when we were casting. Michelle [Ashford] had written the script before I came on, and it was important to me to connect with her because I wanted to make sure that we were making a movie that would make people feel the way the story did. We seem to have so many of the same generational and cultural references in shorthand, and we became good friends in the process. We were in touch throughout, and I tried to keep that North Star of what Kristen wanted people to feel. Also, she met the cast before we started shooting, and they listened to her read her story on an audiobook, so it was very fluid and very communicative.
KR: When it first happened—and I think this is the right attitude—it was like: I have to take a step back and let go. The worst thing I could have done as it was getting conceived and created was to be like, “Well, I’m the author, so I’m the God of this world, and you have to listen to me.” I knew that if something was going to grow, I needed to take a step back and let it become what it was going to be.
Cat Person succeeds in capturing the mundane subtleties of dating. It gave voice to this irrational logic that we sometimes have, of liking someone purely because we’re imagining our ideal selves by fantasizing their desire of us. Is that a conversation that continued on set?
SF: Oh, definitely. I mean, it’s impossible to talk about the story without divulging personal details from your life, your friends’ lives, the lore of dating that we all share and pass along. Even initially interviewing Nick [Braun] and Emilia [Jones] on Zoom—two strangers—we instantly got into really personal conversations that then became our touchstone for referencing dating stories throughout the process of making it. In rehearsing, we tried to get into the subtext of every encounter between these characters. That subtext was rich with personal anecdotes and connections that aren’t necessarily in the script itself. We talked about how these are two people who are not communicating directly very often, and there’s so many different versions of themselves that they’re toggling between. There’s the presented self on a text message. There’s the internal self that you’re seeing on Margot’s part when she’s not with anybody else. There’s her kind of brassy, presentational fun self with her friend that also isn’t quite authentic. We talked a lot about our different identities and different selves. I think the truth is a combination of all of those different versions, but we’re rarely ever just completely authentic. That’s part of what breaks down in Margot’s world, I think, is just not being able to integrate how she feels with what she’s saying and the boundaries she’s able to set.
KR: What the story is about, in a lot of ways, is being trapped alone in your head with your own perceptions and trying to clear away, kind of like what you said, What is my fantasy and what is real? And is there another person on the other side of this encounter? In a way, that’s also the experience of reading a story. You’re alone with a page, you just have to do your interpretations by yourself. But, as soon as the story moves into the world, and as soon as there are two real people on film, suddenly there are all these bridges of conversation.
SF: People ask a lot of questions about dating in the internet age and smartphones and all that. What’s interesting to me is all of the data you’re getting, literally and figuratively, about another person—it’s evidence that’s been tampered with by your own brain’s reading of it, because you’re not actually with the other person. You don’t actually have any information about how it feels to be with that person. Whether you feel safe, comfortable, seen—none of it is relevant when you’re sitting in your pajamas by yourself in your room comfortably reading someone’s words, but then it’s processed through all of the filters of your own analysis, what mood you’re in that day, what you decided about that person five minutes ago on the phone with your friend. It’s all really messing with that data. It doesn’t really tell the story at all about the person that you’re going to be sitting two feet away from at a bar. I think a lot of the anger in dating comes from the fact that the person at the bar isn’t acting like themselves, but “themselves” is this other majorly mediated thing that has to do with you in your own head. They barely have anything to do with it, ultimately.
Susanna, you’ve spoken about initial uncertainties over how the story could be adapted, since a lot of the narrative is driven by what’s happening internally, and that might be hard to translate into film. I would argue that you proved your initial hesitations wrong because the film really excels at capturing Margot’s interiority, like those abrupt interjections of her imagining Robert’s fictional therapy sessions, for example. Can you tell me how you went about portraying those internal thoughts so that it made sense onscreen?
SF: My concern about it was that, whatever adaptation came of it, it wouldn’t really externalize and dramatize those thoughts, even though those thoughts were so vividly explained. Because she’s not verbalizing them all, I just didn’t know how it would play out without a really invasive voiceover. I think I just saw the movie as potentially feeling very small and internal in a way that would actually prevent it from having the resonance and reach that Kristen’s story did—particularly because when things are small and internal and about women, men don’t go see them. But, I think Michelle really leaned into the inter-genre idea that Kristen laid out. By the time I read Michelle’s script, I understood what Kristen had said was her intention all along, which was really that it is a mixed-genre experience. Being a young woman each day contains different genres. There’s always a primal fear if there’s someone behind you in a dark alley that you’re going to get murdered, even if five minutes before, you’re having a fun romantic-comedy-esque conversation with your friend at a bar, and then suddenly you’re thinking about getting stabbed, and then it’s all part of the stew of what it feels like to be a woman. Making that manifest in this cinematic way felt really right.
The original story ends with Robert sending a string of increasingly hostile texts to Margot, but the movie imagines what happens after. How did you both react to seeing the expanded ending?
KR: It’s strange. I compared it to like having a dream: It’s in your head, and then you turn around and, oh, actually someone else was there and there’s this whole other room and plot thread. When it works well, you feel so seen. It feels like the things you’re alone in your head with—now, there’s a person embodying them, there’s a soundtrack, there’s context, there’s Margot going home and she has a mom. She blows up into this whole world and you’re like, Whoa, that’s exactly right. I didn’t write it, but how did you know? At the same time, it’s also like watching your children go off and have lives without you. It’s probably joyful and terrifying in the way that having a kid would be, although I don’t have one, where you just both are, like, I made this in some way—the seed of this thing I invented and created this world and I have no control over it. What are these kids doing running around?
I think about writing “Cat Person” alone in my head and being like, I wonder if I’m the only person who’s ever had this thought. And then five years later, this resounding screaming, “No, you’re not the only person who’s had this thought!” And you’re in a movie theater with thousands of other people watching these characters.
SF: I felt like it was an opportunity to add a chapter in the story, not to upend the impact of what that text message [at the end of “Cat Person”] said, but to say, “Okay, and then what happens if there’s another episode where you run into the person who sent you that message? Then what?” That opened up another set of conversations that I thought were interesting, too. If someone ends things in that way, and then you run into them, there’s going to be more fear and a raising of the stakes of feeling like, What is the person who sent that message capable of doing physically in the real world and am I in danger? I was excited to take it to that really dramatic place because, for one thing, I felt like it was going to be important to make men watch this movie, which I think they need to do. If it was the more internal, just-from-the-woman’s-perspective thing, and it ended with that ending that the short story did, I feel like it would kind of be the same conversation on loop in the culture, with the same men having the same opinion. I was excited to open up a different conversation that could be unlocked through having an ellipsis that led to more. I’m hopeful that that kind of extra chapter allows men to engage in a slightly different version of the conversation that everyone exhausted themselves having a few years ago.
It’s interesting that the original story ends on an ambiguous note. Robert isn’t necessarily a serial killer, but he’s also clearly not that leading man archetype that Margot had hoped he’d be. It lives in this gray space. Was that ambiguity intentional?
SF: I wanted to end it in such a way where people would have different opinions and be able to continue to project their own experiences onto this encounter and walk away with different perspectives on who did what wrong so that they could then think about their own lives. I didn’t want it to end on a note that was absolute. And I think that’s good, because that’s what happens when there are two people and two perspectives and everyone’s bringing their own baggage to the table and their own agendas and their own toxicities and problems as well—in particular, Robert’s.
KR: People talk about it as ambiguity, but there’s a way that the ending of the story isn’t ambiguous at all. “Whore.” It’s not subtle; it’s the opposite of subtle. What it is is unprocessed. You don’t get any “And then moral of the story is people shouldn’t be mean to each other on the internet!” or “This is why he did it.” What we expect a lot from stories is kind of like: “Now we feel better at the end because we know what it means.” I love my story. I think a lot of people loved it, but a lot of people really didn’t. I feel like part of the reason is it doesn’t give you that satisfaction of getting to understand clearly how you’re supposed to feel and why you felt that way.
I’ll never forget this. There was an interview with somebody at another literary magazine who rejected the story, and he was like, “The reason that I didn’t take ‘Cat Person’ was because I thought that Margot should get the last word.” And I was like, “That’s bold of you, male literary editor.” Yeah, it would be nice if at the end we all got to feel better about this. It feels gross and bad to have the last word just be whore, but that’s part of the experience reading the story. In that sense, I feel like the movie does capture the feeling of the story, which is that you have a lot of feelings and you don’t quite feel like you got to sort through them in a way that’s satisfying. There’s a lack of, for better word, catharsis that leaves people uncomfortable.
Was there ever a moment during that initial reaction to “Cat Person” where you felt protective of your work, of it potentially being misinterpreted or used to prop up an argument that you didn’t necessarily believe in yourself?
KR: I’m sure every writer has to learn to let go of the reactions to their work, but, for me, I had to learn it real fast and real hard. It’s not easy. I love my opinions. I think my opinions are great. My perspective on the world is the correct one—that’s how it feels to be alive. So, obviously to a certain degree, I know what I was thinking and I know what I want people to think. The great lesson of doing anything creative is, like: Shut up. It doesn’t matter. You get to say the thing in the story and people build off and interpret it the way they want. And some of those interpretations will be, for me, wrong, and some of them will be for me. And the fact that I have that opinion could not matter in the slightest.
SF: One thing that’s been really interesting [about] the conversations around consent in the culture recently is it feels like there’s a focus on getting a verbal yes and then that’s all that matters, or that whether that consent was technically given is somehow the most important fact and the most important piece of information. But one thing I loved about Kristen’s story—and I really tried to show in the movie—is that [Margot] does consent many times. It’s so much more complicated than whether someone said one syllable, one time. I think that’s most people’s experience.
It’s neither a great love story where no one has to ask because everybody just reads each other’s minds, nor are most encounters a clear-cut case of somebody drawing a boundary verbally and the other person overriding it in a problematic and illegal way. Most encounters are in between. That ambiguity is the kind of thing that people are more hesitant to acknowledge. … When you talk about ambiguity, it really incenses people. There are certain unimpeachable opinions that you can have, like: It’s wrong to override a no. That’s true. But there’s so many more things that are questionable, debatable, wrong, problematic, understandable, forgivable, messy. I think that’s why people got so fired up about Kristen’s story.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
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