‘Catwalk: Tales from the Cat Show Circuit’ director talks cat show experience

You’ve heard of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. But have you heard of the Canadian Cat Association?

I’m willing to bet you haven’t. Aaron Hancox and Michael McNamara – directors of the 2018 documentary “Catwalk: Tales from the Cat Show Circuit” – hadn’t really either before they got to work on the film. Cat shows aren’t quite as prevalent in popular culture as their dog counterparts. What they found, though, was a catty rivalry for the ages.

Catty in the sense that the competition is between – well, cats. Not in any sort of real animosity between the cat owners themselves. Just some friendly competition. The documentary follows Kim Langille and her Turkish Angora Bobby going toe-to-toe with Shirley McCollow and her Red Persian, aptly named Oh La La. As the cat competition season goes along, these two are the cream of the crop, battling it out to see who will be the best.

“Catwalk” debuted in 2018, but a special screening will take place at Kennesaw State University on Oct. 7, featuring a conversation with McNamara about the making of the film. Ahead of the screening, Rough Draft spoke to McNamara about all things cats. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I have to say, I didn’t know much about the world of competitive cat shows before I watched this, and I was doing a little bit of research on you – I read that you’re allergic to cats. Is that true?

Michael McNamara: I’ve actually long lived with cats in households, and I like them a lot. To look at them. If I touch them and touch my face, I get itchy and sneezy and all that stuff. It was really bad when I was a kid, but anyway. I just came to learn that as long as I’m not handling them, I’m okay.

To my mind, I mean certainly the cats were big stars of the film, but it was about the passion of the characters who were raising the cats and showing the cats that I found really irresistible. I just kept my hands to myself [laughs].

Speaking about those two main characters, Kim and Shirley, they are very interesting. I wondered, when you and your co-director started making this, did they come up pretty early as the focus in the process of making the movie? How did you stumble upon their rivalry as the centerpiece?

McNamara: One of my associates, Aaron Hancox, who is credited as co-director, he’s a dyed-in-the-wool cat man. He had gone to the Canadian National Exhibition, which is this annual thing in Toronto where they – it’s like a giant, national, state fair kind of thing.

He was wandering the halls, and he saw this handwritten sign – “This way to the cat show.” He was like, what? He wandered in and saw judging going on and all these cats. He was like, what the hell is this? He met a few people, and he came back excitedly to the office and said, “You won’t believe what I found.” We said, okay, let’s get back to these people right away.

Bob and Elaine [Gleason], the couple who are judges and also show cats, have devoted their lives to this. So they were kind of the way into the story. We immediately just started talking about, okay, who are the big contenders? They said, well, there is this thing developing right now, it’s kind of a rivalry. They’re neck and neck. We immediately reached out to both of them, and they were both more than willing to become involved. Shirley’s a little bit quieter and a little bit more reserved, you know. But she does like to compete. And Kim, of course, is every documentary filmmaker’s dream – wears her heart on her sleeve, was opinionated and speaks in quotable quotes.

Yeah, it’s always nice when you get those pithy quotes. You’re like, yes! Little fist bump.

McNamara: Absolutely. Like, “If you’re not in first place, you’re the loser.”

The personalities really struck me, because I think you think of cat people as being sort of similar, but they were all very different. Every person you stumbled upon was very different.

McNamara: Yeah, we wanted to also kind of show what they did in their spare time. So we see Bob and his interest in old cars, and Elaine and her garden. And Kim scuba diving – as far away from cats as you can get.

You haven’t asked this question yet, but all the films we’ve ever made – not all of them, but most of them – have been about people who have passions about what they do. Even if you don’t know anything about it, their passion is infectious. Their passion is intriguing. Spending time with anybody who is, in their mind anyway, a world expert on, you know, scratchy 45 RPM records or in this case, cats, is time well spent. We always approach these people with respect and love in order to be worthy of their confidence. I think the minute you betray that confidence is the minute you’ve not only sold your soul, but the word gets around, you know? So you’ve got to be respectful. That’s what we spend our time doing, is basically making everybody that we’re filming a rock star.

Like I said, I had never really thought about cat shows as a concept – which is silly. There are dog shows, and there are things out there for a lot of people in the world. It makes sense there would be cat shows. I wondered if you got the sense during your time working on this project, or from anyone who is involved in that world, why competitive cat shows haven’t really taken off in the same way dog shows have?

McNamara: That’s a really good question. The tradition of what’s called in the UK, they call it the Cat Fancy – it is highly competitive. There’s a Canadian Cat Association, there’s – I’m trying to remember the name of the other association that’s in the United States, which Canadians will compete in, but it’s a big one. It’s popular in France and in England, and big in Japan. Huge in Japan. It’s actually bigger than we were able to even talk about. But in some ways, it is kind of the poor cousin to Westminster [Kennel Club Dog Show] and those kinds of things.

A little less pomp, I guess. Or at least it seemed that way.

McNamara: I mean, we were filming in drafty curling rinks in small towns in Ontario, in Quebec, in New Brunswick. There’s nothing glamorous about it. That scene when we were filming in Moncton where they had to start late because a wrestling match [laughs] booked later and kept them from being able to set up. In my mind, there  couldn’t have been anything better to film [laughs].

I believe there’s a sequel to this movie. I was going to ask if there was anything that didn’t make it into this movie that you wish did. But if there’s a sequel, I wonder if you were able to put it all into that one.

McNamara: We had a shorter version [of the film] that we did for the CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation], and we cut a longer version to put in festivals. When it went to festivals, a number of distributors were really interested … When Netflix showed it, the first weekend it screened was on the long Martin Luther King weekend a few years ago. It also happened to be a big snowstorm on the eastern seaboard, and everyone was stuck home watching Netflix. There was this overwhelming rush of Twitter responses and fan art – people were doing drawings of Oh La La. Not just cat owners. A lot of them were saying, we want more!

We showed this to CBC, because we had done the shorter version, which got a lot of attention in Canada, but obviously didn’t get international attention like it did on Netflix. So we kind of leveraged that into getting some development money from the CBC to do some more shooting, and find more characters and more stories. We wanted to do it as a series – a limited, six-or-eight-part series, where we follow some new characters and maybe some of the original characters over the period of a full season. Then, COVID happened. We’d already done probably about a week’s worth of filming, just in development to cast people and so on. You know, CBC gave us the greenlight on a Thursday, I think. And then on Friday, they announced they were going to lock down the whole country. They called us back on Monday and said, forget what we said last week.

A year into the pandemic, they contacted us and said, could you guys maybe do just a one hour film for us? We had enough material, we shot a little bit of additional material under the COVID restrictions. There was some interesting and surprising developments in our sequel, as it were. We caught up with Kim and with Elaine and Bob. I think it was a pretty fun movie, but it didn’t have the freshness that the first one had. If we had been able to do the series, I think we would have had something great. But, you know – the one that got away.

The screening of “Catwalk: Tales from the Cat Show Circuit” is free, but requires registration to attend.

The post ‘Catwalk: Tales from the Cat Show Circuit’ director talks cat show experience appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta .