Tom’s Cats aim for the movies

OSCAr-WINNING director Tom Hooper is exploring how to make a film of the musical Cats. He has signed a contract to investigate how such a film could be made, in the light of huge advances in movie-making techniques.

Hooper, who won an Academy Award for The King’s Speech and was nominated by BAFTA for his version of the hit show Les Miserables, has started a process known in the film business as r&D (research and development).

What Hooper and his associates will try to decide is whether a film could be made using computer generated images (CGI) or live action — or a combination of both, like Disney’s recent global blockbuster The Jungle Book, which married brilliant CGI images with live shots of the young actor playing Mowgli.

‘Do you somehow use actors, sophisticated puppets, CGI — or what? That’s the point of the exercise. We hope to be able to answer all of those questions, following along period of research,’ an executive involved in the project told me.

Hooper will be collaborating with a development team at Working Title Films and with composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.

If a decision is made to continue on to full production, and actually make a movie, then nothing would happen until late 2017 and well into 2018. For starters, a screenwriter hasn’t been assigned; and clearly, no humans — or felines — have been cast.

I’m told that Hooper has gone back to T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats to examine the poems that inspired Lloyd Webber decades ago, when he was putting together the original show at the New London Theatre back in 1981.

Trevor Nunn, who directed that show, told me he studied a l ot of Eliot’s published and unpublished works, as part of his preparation.

Some of the ideas for additional lyrics in the song Memory (which he co-wrote) were inspired by that material.

The stage show was originally produced by Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, and it turned into a phenomenon that continues to enthrall audiences to this day. A revival involving the original creative team of Nunn, choreographer and associate director Gillian Lynne, and costume and scenic designer John Napier, with lighting by David Hersey, was staged at the Palladium for two years running.

And Cats will re-open on Broadway this August, with Nunn directing again.

The songs still have the power to seduce — though a hip-hop number that was added for the recent London show will be dropped.

I wonder, too, how a movie would affect the chances of a live show in the future. Could Cats on stage become just a theatrical Memory?