Behind the scenes: Cats

“It’s completely barking mad, obviously,” says director of photography Christopher Ross, BSC of the first time he read the script for Cats. “The only way you can get some sense of the pace at which the songs take place is to read it while playing a recording of its Broadway run or of the play’s original London cast otherwise it reads like an enormous monologue.”

TS Eliot’s string of poetical whimsy from ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’ published in 1939 was an odd choice for a stage musical when it debuted in 1981 but Andrew Lloyd Webber’s interpretation became a record-breaking phenomenon.

His Dark Materials’ director Tom Hooper, who delivered eight Oscar nominations for adapting Les Misérables for the screen in 2012, together with Billy Elliot and Rocketman writer Lee Hall, were deemed the purr-fect pair to bottle the magic for cinema in by Working Title’s star-studded U$95 million revival.

Hooper and Hall’s screenplay puts the character of Victoria (Francesca Haywood) front and centre and the film about her journey to become reborn with a second life.

“It’s a quite mind-boggling concept,” says Ross (whose last film, Yesterday, imagined a world without The Beatles). Why choose to do something bland when you can take on the challenge of creating something no-one has seen before?

His first conversations were influenced by…