Tom Hooper: I’m good. I’m tired, but happy.

Sims: I saw you at the premiere last night onstage and you seemed very happy to be showing us the film, but you sounded … very tired. Have you just been working on the movie up to the minute?

Hooper: Yes. Seven days a week since August.

Sims: What were the final touches required?

Hooper: I did some sound-mix updates [three days ago], and then it was just putting final visual-effects shots in. We work in so many time zones—India, Australia, Canada—that you’ll think you’re done and then get a package in at 4 a.m. But it was fun to do a premiere that’s a genuine premiere, in the sense that I wasn’t bullshitting when I said, “You are the first people to see it in this totally finished form.” We didn’t really test the film, because without the visual effects it might be quite misleading. So it was amazing to sit in the audience and see how it played.

Sims: By the end, you want them won over.

Hooper: The second shot of Rebel Wilson in the film, when she yawns, she puts her tail over her mouth, and everyone laughed. And I was like, “Phew,” because people only laugh if they’re relaxed enough to be open to a joke. So it was a great barometer. When things are more serious, it’s harder to judge.

Read: Just embrace the madness of “Cats”

Sims: It’s not only a light moment, but also the thing you’re visually attempting is in full force there—the actors are going to have tails, they’re going to behave like cats, but they’re not going to be quite cats, and will that come across?

Hooper: [Laughs] And I haven’t really built applause points in, because the action just keeps going.

Sims: You said at the premiere that you saw Cats when you were 8 years old. What is it about the stage show that made it a phenomenon that you’re trying to carry over?

Hooper: You’ve got to think of how avant-garde it was at the time. There was a definite influence of, I thought, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and that sort of ’70s sci-fi, with a punk aesthetic.

Sims: But with an open heart. It’s much more sincere.

Hooper: Yeah. But in terms of what worked for me as a kid, I really enjoyed the sense of going through the portal and being told, “We cats don’t give a shit about you, but on this special night we’re going to let you in on the secret.” That sense of being an initiate into a secret world felt analogous to being let into the adult world for an evening. It was quite a sexy show—if they weren’t cats, would you be taking an 8-year-old? One of the things I found special was to be able to be guided in my choices as a director by my vivid recollection of Cats at 8.

When I was finishing Les Misérables, I thought it’d be sad if I never did another musical, because I learned so much. A thing I particularly enjoyed about Les Mis was that it had never been adapted before. So I thought, Are there any other iconic musicals that haven’t been adapted? And Cats is kind of the only one of that generation. Spielberg had optioned it in the mid-’90s.