Audiences coming out of the horror prequel "A Quiet Place: Day One" have been singing the praises (though, in a silent fashion) of Lupita Nyong-o’s cat, Frodo. Most of the Quiet Place: Day One reviews have gone out of the way to credit the phenomenal feline performance, accepting the fact that dogs would be too loud and reactionary in the "Quiet Place" universe to survive very long. Not Frodo. This cat quickly figures out how to get by in the creature-laden world. And that’s because it wasn’t just one cat on the set of "A Quiet Place: Day One." It was two.
The film’s director, Michael Sarnoski, stopped by CinemaBlend’s official podcast ReelBlend to dig into massive spoilers for the brand new horror movie. And while it seems like we spent a LOT of time talking about the cat performance… well, that’s because the cat is a significant part of "A Quiet Place: Day One," and a big reason – for me – the movie works as well as it does. It was during this conversation that Sarnoski explained that he chose two cats to play Frodo, and that he knew very early on that he did not want to have to rely on a CG cat, capturing as much of the cat in camera as he could.
The film’s director, Michael Sarnoski, stopped by CinemaBlend’s official podcast ReelBlend to dig into massive spoilers for the brand new horror movie. And while it seems like we spent a LOT of time talking about the cat performance… well, that’s because the cat is a significant part of "A Quiet Place: Day One," and a big reason – for me – the movie works as well as it does. It was during this conversation that Sarnoski explained that he chose two cats to play Frodo, and that he knew very early on that he did not want to have to rely on a CG cat, capturing as much of the cat in camera as he could.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00It was just kind of meeting all these cats and finding Schnitzel who had just a certain
00:05thing to him.
00:06He seemed wise, he seemed older than his years, he seemed very astute and sharp, but also
00:14kind of aloof in his own way.
00:16He seemed like he had an inner world going on, and I kind of bought him as a New York
00:22Street cat or something.
00:24So I think casting was a big part of it, just finding a cat that had the right feeling when
00:28you looked at it.
00:30And then other than that, it was just a lot of trial and error, a lot of training.
00:33I mean, they trained those cats for months beforehand, putting them in pools, getting
00:39them used to water, getting them used to being carried in a bag, walking on a leash, all
00:43of that stuff.
00:45And then also making the cats comfortable, making them comfortable with Lupita and Joe.
00:50Joe and Lupita spent a lot of time with the cats outside of shooting just to kind of make
00:55it so they were at ease and could look comfortable and not like they were just, why am I sitting
01:00here?
01:01What's going on?
01:03And also when you're doing something that a cat doesn't really want to do, which is
01:05like floating in a violin case in a flooded subway, they need to be surrounded by people
01:12that they sort of trust and feel safe around.
01:15So I think it was a combination of all those things.
01:18And then just very specifically choosing the shots and actions that we wanted to capture
01:23for the cats to kind of convey these characters and these performances.
01:26So that was sort of a long answer, but it was a lot.