One of the many names attached to Cat People's false starts was Bob Clark of Black Christmas fame, and according to Fries his script was the best example of the old-fashioned period pieces that just didn't interest audiences anymore. "Clark's screenplay stayed with a fairly conventional approach. He had lots of flasbacks to the heroine's early life, dreams and the history of these cat people in Serbia. You know how it is, Dracula always seems to wind up in Transylvania, Cat People always seem to come from Serbia. It wasn't what we hoped for."
It wasn't until the late 1970s that Fries' Cat People began to pick up steam, after director Roger Vadim (renowned for erotically charged films such as And God Created Woman and Barbarella) and exploitation screenwriter Alan Ormsby were attached to the project.It was Ormsby's script that was enough to impress Universal Studios into picking up the picture, thanks to both the strength of the character writing, and also ramping up the horror, with the transformations now being explicit and bloody.
Fries said, "The thing that really brought Ormsby's work to a new level was the epidermal changes that take place in the Cat People. When they transform, the human skin breaks away and the animals bursts out from the inside, leaving the human skin in little gobs all around. There's this continual evolution of the body in the Cat People - that was really the breakthrough and, in my opinion, that's what attracted people to the project later on."By his own admission, Ormsby just wanted the film be in line with the trend of increasingly violent films. "In the first draft of the screenplay, you don't actually see the transformations. (...) I guess I felt like I'd cheated. To tell you the truth, the 'cats bursting through the skin' approach was just a crass commercial decision. I figured, Well, this is the era of Alien."
At this stage, Roger Vadim left the production, and so Universal tried to find another director; their list of choices included Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg and Joe Dante. Yet it was Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Taxi Driver and director of American Gigolo, who ended up taking on Cat People. Schrader had been struggling to come up with an original film for some time, and was so impressed by Ormsby's script that he decided to adapt it. Schrader said;"Something about the script just struck me, so I decided to give up on trying to write something myself and do it. (...) I saw in it something I could use not only to get back to work, but to do a film of poetry, myth and eros. It isn't a horror film per se, but uses a horror context to play upon our notions of sexuality, sexual presence and sexual iconography."
The strength of Ormsby's script also was what got Thomas R. Burman to take on the film's makeup effects. Burman would say years later, "What attracted me to Cat People, there was a lot of rumors about the script, it was very dark, it was very sexual. And then I got the script, I read it and I loved it. I loved its darkness, I loved the idea of turning somebody into a cat. I didn't see it as American Werewolf in London, I saw it more like something almost sensual, and the transformation from a woman into a cat, I thought was almost sexual."Burman also explained how he got the gig. "I first heard from the office of Charles Fries, the producer, about a year before I got the job. (...) Then I didn't hear again until Paul Schrader called. If I recall properly, Rick Baker had turned it down, and Dick Smith had turned it down. I read the script, and much of it I loved very much. It was graphic, but Schrader said that he wanted it to be less graphic and more psychological, and that idea I liked very much."
Makeup effects had been undergoing a revolution of sorts in the early 1980s, with the likes of Altered States, The Howling and American Werewolf in London all showcases for graphic transformation effects. In all these films, it had been men transforming into monsters, but in Cat People, this time it was to be a woman, Nastassja Kinski, undergoing the changes.
This presented a bit of a problem for Burman, who decided to give the job to his future wife, makeup artist Bari Dreiband. "I assigned a woman artist, Bari Dreiband, to design all of Kinski's transformations to give it a feminine touch. We wanted it to be delicate. Being a pretty girl to begin with, we wanted to match her features with those of a sleek, regal cat. We wanted to show rippling muscles, not balooning or stretching skin."
The second stage makeup had Kinski's whole body covered in a bodysuit fitted with air bladders, to give an impression of bones forming into a new feline shape. The suit was worn with a facial prosthetic that gave Kinski's face a cat-like appearance.
Burman realized that, indirectly, he was competing with the aforementioned early 1980s transformation-themed films, and so had to revise his makeups to not make it seem too similar to the work of Dick Smith, Rick Baker and Rob Bottin. This was quite frustrating for Burman."Schrader had already seen Altered States when we began this film, which is certainly one of the films that he had in mind while dealing with the transformation; then The Howling came out, and he was wondering whether he should tear up the whole thing and go even further toward the psychological approach; then An American Werewolf in London was released, and Universal decided that they wanted Cat People to be more graphic, about three-quarters of the way through the film. It took a tremendous amount of time, and a certain amount of 'cheating', but we did that. The cat does break out, but not exactly as described in the script."
Ormsby, who had written the transformations in the first place, felt he was justified in wanting to see something new. "Personally, I wouldn't want to see this movie if it didn't surpass what had already been done in something like The Howling."
Burman himself was not fond of the full transformation suit. "We had a full body makeup, but I don't think it ever worked, I didn't like it. We used parts of that, when the spine and chest are forming, those we did in insert shots. But the full body makeup, I thought it made her look gross and kind of hideous, so we didn't use much of that in the film, just a few frames. "
The transformation suit would also be one of the main points of friction between Burman and Schrader, a director who had never really worked with makeup effects before. Burman was appalled by how Schrader filmed the suit in the first cut.
"They shot it exactly the way it wasn't meant to be done. We had designed the suit for Angie Brown to wear in an upright position, with the head raised almost majestically. When they shot it, they had her hunching down in this body suit on all fours.
It made the entire thing wrinkle and it looked absolutely awful. After eight hours of makeup, I looked at what was going on and thought, 'My god, this is not working!' Well, Schrader had his own ideas. He told me the effect wasn't going to work for his purposes unless she was hunched down on the bed. He went ahead and shot it his way. It looked bad and he knew it."To make matters worse, Schrader did not appreciate Burman's advice in the slightest, and tried to have him taken off the picture and replaced by another makeup artist. Burman was very unhappy upon finding out how underhanded Schrader had been.
"Rather than have anyone come and say, 'Look, this isn't working. Is there any way we can do it better?', they called Dick Smith and asked him if he could come in and save the thing. It's only because Dick is a friend of mine that he let me know. I'd sit there in rushes and (Schrader) wouldn't say anything, good or bad. He'd just file out without a word.That isn't helpful in what's supposed to be a collaborative enterprise. Nobody had the guts to speak up. I had pretty vocal arguments with John Frankenheimer on Prophecy, and with Michael Cimino on Heaven's Gate, but at least things got discussed. The kind of thing that happened on Cat People is a shame because it's unncessary. It was hard to swallow."
Alan Ormsby's script had a deeply visceral description of how the werecat transformation was supposed to look, and in a manner very different to the werewolf transformations of Howling and American Werewolf. Cinefantastique printed out an excerpt of the script which read;
“And the flesh from her forehead splits, a crack like a run in tautly-stretched rubber, and more and more cracks appear as the flesh pops, splits , tears, and we see the dark form higgling to free itself from the human cocoon, shaking its head wildly back and forth, ripping away the membrane that once was Irena, pushing its head, black, wet as a newborn child, through the webby covering, tearing with its jaws, pulling the fleshy bag away and chewing it as if it were a placenta until there are only tatters left, and a pinkish, thick pool where Irena once lay."
The aforementioned problems with how Schrader shot the scene, however, meant that the sequence had to be heavily trimmed down; the skin ripping would now only be the final shot of the sequence. Burman felt that this helped the film's tone, however."Now you won't see things like pieces of the girl's legs bursting open. You also won't see her shaking away a placenta-like part of her shedding skin. The whole concept of splitting flesh is now downplayed. Frankly, I don't think it ever should have been done that way.
As I'd kept saying, it seemed to me that the audience would related to Nastassia's character as sympathetic and pretty. To play upon her transformation too long or too grotesquely, with skin ripping open, would be destructive to the film.She begins to change shape, then the skin splits and falls away to be replaced by this articulated panther head that snarls and grimaces. The expansion of the head was done by using expandable pneumatics that we had made actually part of the appliance."
The mechanical effects of Cat People were handled by Ellis Burman's Cosmekinetics, who would also provide puppet effects for James Cameron's The Terminator two years later. Thomas Burman, Ellis' brother, explained how the transformation puppet worked.
"Ellis devised a way of putting the eyes on long tubes. When we pulled the human face away, the eyes retracted back into the leopard's head. He also devised a mechanism for pulling the lips back and making the teeth grow."Ellis Burman himself also said about the puppet, "We wanted the eyes to be constantly in motion, even while they were retracting. The eyes were on rods that pivoted in the middle and were articulated in three places. Unfortunately, audiences never got to see any of it."
In the 1970s and 1980s, the makeup artist trade unions had strict definitions that prevented 'mechanical effects' as being included under their jurisdiction, meaning the Burmans couldn't operate the skin-ripping puppet on-set. The puppet instead had to be operated by Universal's special effects crewmen, who were too rough on the puppet! Burman remembered;"Without any preparation, five guys were supposed to be able to choreograph this apparatus. The whole thing was chaos. They tangled the eye mechanisms with the lines that pulled the face back. They yanked the eyes right out of their sockets, just destroyed it."
In contrast to the original 1942 film, Ormsby and Schrader's film also starred a male werecat; Irena's brother Paul, played by Malcolm McDowell. The inclusion of a lecherous male werecat was partly due to Ormsby's concern that his script could be read as misogynistic.
Ormsby himself said, "It was the girl’s sexuality that unleashed all this violence, so you could conceivably take that viewpoint. That’s one of the reasons why I later invented the character of the brother, who is also one of the Cat People. It took the story away from being seen as some kind of hostile sexist slur."The character's brutish nature was reflected in the makeup design, as Burman explained. "We didn't want the sensuality, we didn't want the erotic look (like Irena). We wanted to make him look like he had power, and he was going to become a cat, a grotesqueness about it."
The Paul panther corpse was a simple prop, and unlike most gruesome films of the era avoided using actual animal meat products. Alan Hall, a special effects artist who assisted Burman, explained why. "I have a philosophy that you should never use real animal guts. If you're shooting for more than one day, you have problems with rotting and detorioation. Sometimes, you're shooting for three or four days; by then, real animal guts stink!"
"(Ellis) was one of the first people in makeup to use animatronics. He's a wonderful mechanic, and he did most of the design. They wanted different parts and pieces for this film, but I don't anyone was really sure about what they needed or what they wanted, including Paul Schrader. I think he wanted as much as he could get, and he would select from that."
The most elaborate of Ellis Burman's mechanical panthers was a fully-sized animatronic panther, that sadly never got used in the final film as Burman remembered.
"(Schrader) wanted a cat that could stand and it could swish the tail back and forth, he wanted the head to turn back and forth, he wanted the eyes to move, he wanted the mouth to snarl, and he wanted the ears to lay back, and he wanted it able to crouch down!So my brother made a mechanical cat that was radio-controlled, but they didn't use much of that in the film. It was always available, swinging its tail and moving its head, but the cats were well trained and everyone was fortunate enough to get the shots they needed."
Thomas Burman did not have the best time making Cat People, partly thanks to his sour working relationship with Paul Schrader. In an interview with Fangoria, Burman looked back on why he and Schrader just did not see eye to eye.
"I have to put some of the blame here on myself, I suppose. It was partly a lack of communication - not communication concerning the work, but of Schrader's vision; we didn't have a wonderful rapport. And it was a matter of my expectations.I expected that it would be done as I saw it, the way I wanted it to go, which was the way that we had planned and choreographed it when we spoke about it. I think that when we got on the spot, there was a decision on his part to make it work according to his own, separate vision, and then the storyboards didn't seem to matter."
In that same interview, Burman jokily said, "I used to wonder why veteran makeup people always seemed so bitter, but as I progress, I'm beginning to sound more and more like them."Yet later on Burman would take a more positive view of the work he did, even if it was under a director he didn't really quite get on with. "I had my doubts, but Cat People ended up being just what I'd hoped it would be. It's the first time I've been totally satisfied with a picture I've worked on. It's just what a makeup picture should be!"
Sources:
- Fangoria #18
- CINEFANTASTIQUE, Vol 12, #4, (May 1982)
- Cat People bluray interview featurette with Tom Burman
