Sumith Prasad
In Michael Sarnoski’s apocalyptic horror film ‘A Quiet Place: Day One,’ Sam is a terminally ill patient who deals with cancer with her sole companion: a cat named Frodo. When she tries to survive the attack of a deadly alien species with sharp hearing, the cat remains with her. Sam attempts to protect her feline friend through thick and thin, embracing him even while her life is on the line with a monstrous creature chasing her. When she encounters a chance to survive the aliens, she ensures that her pet will not die by handing him over to Eric. Even though it may sound unbelievable at first, Sarnoski was able to shoot the entire movie using real cats playing Frodo!
Nico and Schnitzel: The Feline Stars of Day One
Nico and Schnitzel, two real cats, play Frodo in ‘A Quiet Place: Day One.’ When Michael Sarnoski was developing the movie, the initial reaction from his collaborators revolved around creating a computer-generated cat to accompany Lupita Nyong’o’s Sam. However, the filmmaker was not at all ready to move forward with the same. “[…] I said, ‘No, I really want to do all the cat stuff for real and not ever do a CG cat.’ Everyone was like, ‘We’ll see about that.’ But thankfully, we managed it with incredible cat trainers and incredible cat performers. Everyone assumed [we] wouldn’t be able to pull it off the old-fashioned way, but I’m really happy we did,” Sarnoski told The Hollywood Reporter.
Nico and Schnitzel were delivered by Birds & Animals UK, a company that has provided animal and animal training to film and television crews since 2000. The company has collaborated with high-profile projects such as ‘Deadpool & Wolverine,’ ‘Wonka,’ ‘Fast X,’ ‘House of the Dragon,’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.’ The two cats also behaved very admirably during the filming process. “These two cats got along and would hang out all day,” Sarnoski told Variety.
Sarnoski conceived Frodo as a cat rather than a rabbit or dog because of the former’s characteristics, which is evident in the film as well. “A cat is one of the only things that you might be able to manage, maybe a bunny rabbit, but a dog would not do very well,” the filmmaker added. Since dogs were too “barky” in the eyes of the writer-director, Frodo had to be a cat, even though Nyong’o was terrified of the animal all her life. “She [Nyong’o] wasn’t just ‘not a fan.’ She was really frightened,” Sarnoski said in the same THR interview.
Paramount Pictures then hired a cat trainer for Nyong’o, and through exposure therapy, she was finally able to overcome her lifelong fear of cats. “And in one of our first meetings, she [Nyong’o] was sitting on the floor of my office and slowly crawled towards the cat, getting a little closer, a little closer, until she finally touched it, and then eventually she was petting it and could pick it up,” Sarnoski added. The filmmaker was adamant about having a cat as an integral part of the narrative because the animal can be “extremely quiet,” a significant trait that has to be present in the “character” for surviving the attack of a species with unparalleled hearing skills.
“They [are] predators; they can stop and move very silently, and I figured, game recognizes game. So, when a cat saw these creatures operating, they’re like, ‘I get you, I’m going to just kind of keep it down,’” Sarnoski added to Variety.
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