Director Tom Hooper promises that his Cats will look better in the finished film

Everyone remembers where they were when they saw that first trailer for Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Cats. Maybe you were waiting at your computer, eagerly refreshing the official website for the Cats movie. Maybe you were ambushed at a party, with a friend saying “You’ve gotta see these fucked-up cat-people.” Maybe you just saw it for the first time when you clicked that link up above and you think all of the hullabaloo is overblown. However you felt about it, Hooper recently told Empire that he was “fascinated” by the big reaction to the trailer, because he “didn’t think it was controversial at all.”

Of course he’d say that, though, because he’s the guy who made it. Hooper is the one who thought it would be a good idea to make the cats weirdly too small and too big in proportion to their surroundings, and also weirdly human-like and not human-like enough. Hooper seems like he was thrilled that Cats was one of the top trending topics on social media, even if it was because of how strange the cats looked. Hey, all press is good press, right?

If you were horrified by the cat-people, Hooper also has some good-ish news: The special effects used for the trailer were at “quite an early stage,” and so “some of the designs of the cats have moved on since then.” He also promises that the people making the film now have a greater understanding of how to use the technology that’s turning Taylor Swift and Judi Dench into cats, so everything should—in theory—look a little better in the final film than it did in that first trailer. You might argue that the problem was more about the design than the tech, sort of like Sonic The Hedgehog, but Hooper clearly isn’t concerned about how the cats of his Cats are going to be received. As long as people are talking about them, he’s happy.