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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.
Transcript
00:00It was just kind of meeting all these cats and finding schnitzel who had like, just like a certain thing
00:05to him. He seemed wise, he seemed older than his ears. He seemed like very like astute and sharp, but
00:14also kind of aloof in his own way. Like he seemed like he had an inner world going on. And
00:19like, I kind of bought him as like a New York street cat or something.
00:24So I think casting was a big part of it. Just finding a cat that like had the right feeling
00:28when you, when you looked at it. And then other than that, it was just a lot of trial and
00:32error, a lot of training. I mean, they trained those cats for months beforehand, you know, putting them in pools,
00:38getting them used to water, getting them used to being carried in a bag, walking on a leash, like all
00:43of that stuff.
00:45And then also like making the cats comfortable, making them comfortable with Lupita and Joe, Joe, Joe and Lupita spent
00:51a lot of time with the cats outside of shooting, just to kind of like make it so they were
00:55at ease and could look comfortable and not like, you know, they were just, why am I sitting here? What's
01:01going on?
01:02And also when you're doing something that a cat doesn't really want to do, which is like floating in a
01:06violin case in a, in a flooded subway, you know, they need to be surrounded by people that they sort
01:13of trust and feel safe around.
01:14Um, so I, I think that was, it was a combination of all those things.
01:18And then just like very specifically, like choosing the shots and actions that we wanted to capture for the cats
01:23to kind of convey these, these characters and these performances.
01:26So that was sort of a long answer, but it was a lot.
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