By Ben Travis | Posted 28 Nov 2019

When the first trailer for the Cats movie arrived, the internet went berserk. Truly, the world was not ready for the sight of a furry Judi Dench, or Taylor Swift with whiskers, or a fuzzy James Corden wearing a waistcoat and spitting on other cat-people – and in response there were memes, articles, social media trends and more, all sparked by that two-and-a-half minute reel. First, Kim Kardashian broke the internet. Then the Cats trailer did.

Talking to Empire in his first interview anywhere about the movie, director Tom Hooper claims that the explosive response caught him off guard. “I was just so fascinated because I didn’t think it was controversial at all,” he says. “So it was quite entertaining. Cats was apparently the number-one trending topic in the world, for a good few hours at least.”

In the four months since the trailer arrived, the film’s visual effects have continued to develop – with Hooper claiming the trailer response helped when it came to making tweaks. “We’d only finished shooting in March, so all the visual effects [in the trailer] were at quite an early stage,” he explains. “Possibly there were, in the extremity in some of the responses, some clues in how to keep evolving [the production]. When you watch the finished film, you’ll see that some of the designs of the cats have moved on since then, and certainly our understanding of how to use the technology to make them work has gone up, too.”

Read more about Cats – the maddest, milkiest film of 2019 – in the new issue of Empire, on sale now. This month’s magazine comes with a bonus Skywalker Saga magazine celebrating the full nine-film Star Wars saga, plus an exclusive Dark Rey art card illustrated by Rory Kurtz.

Find it in all Resistance and First Order-affiliated newsagents, or order a copy online – click here for the galactic heroes cover, here for the Resistance leaders cover, and here for the Kylo Ren and the Knights Of Ren cover.