Filmmaker Explores The Electrical Life Of Cat Artist Louis Wain In Whimsical Drama

Even if audiences aren’t familiar with the artist Louis Wain, chances are they have seen his distinctive colorful artwork. His favorite subject was cats, which he painted and drew in in anthropomorphic poses in bold, bright and electrifying colors. His career began at the end of the latter part of the 19^th century and continued, to an extent, into the early 20^th century. Popular with all social classes, Wain’s artwork changed the public’s perception of cats. That is, the British public, which previously regarded felines as pesky vermin, with little to no purpose other than as instruments for catching even peskier mice.

The story of Wain’s life and preoccupation with cats as well and their connection to the emergence of electricity unfolds in The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Andrea Riseborough, Toby Jones, and featuring Olivia Colman as the narrator.

Filmed in a whimsical yet modern way by British filmmaker Will Sharpe (Black Pond, the UK series Flowers), the period drama tells the story of the inspiring unsung hero (Cumberbatch) who sought to unlock the electrical mysteries of the world in order to understand his own life and the profound love he shared—albeit tragically briefly—with the love his life, Emily Richardson (Foy).

As the only male in a family of six women, including his widowed mother, Wain was responsible for being the breadwinner in Victorian London. An illustrator who would use his considerable talent to record news events, drawing sometimes with both hands at the same time, for a magazine, his earnings were minimal, and he faced the impending redundancy of his profession as photography came into wider use.

Wain tinkered with art but didn’t really get going until he fell for the family governess, brought in to educate his younger sisters. Though of a lower social class, Emily was immediately drawn to the quirky yet talented Louis, and vice versa. Against his family’s wishes, the couple married and they moved to the countryside. Their idyllic life was short-lived, though, as Emily soon was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Before she died, she and Wain found an adorable stray kitten, and named him Peter. Emily left her distraught husband with the encouraging words that the world was full of beauty and that he should capture it. As a widower, he began drawing Peter as well as other cats, and eventually convinced his magazine publisher to give him two pages to publish his work. The public lapped it up and soon Louis Wain’s cats were decorating cards, toys and more. People couldn’t get enough of Wain’s cats.

Unfortunately, the artist forgot to copyright his work and so he made very little off his newfound “success.” Additionally, he suffered other crushing personal loses and eventually his unspecified mental disorder (he had OCD and possibly was schizophrenic) landed him in a mental hospital where he languished for years as his work fell out of favor. Nevertheless, when it was discovered he was in a poorly run facility, fans, including H.G. Wells and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, rallied to pay to move him into a better facility where he could keep cats and continue drawing.

Working from Simon Stephenson’s heartfelt script, Sharpe weaves together Wain’s story as a visionary artist, whose love for his beloved wife transcended her death, and made it possible for him to follow his artistic instincts to the very end of his life.

Amazon Studios’ The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain is now in theaters and will be available on Prime Video Friday Nov. 5.

Sharpe spoke via Zoom about making his film and working with big stars and a few dozen cats.

Angela Dawson: Did you know much about Louis Wain before this? Were you a fan of his artwork?

Will Sharpe: I hadn’t heard of him. I think most people fall into this camp where as soon as I saw his pictures, they felt really familiar to me. I’d definitely seen these cat pictures before but I couldn’t tell you when or where. I suppose even that was kind of interesting to me that I’d come across his work but never stopped to think who the person might be who created it. I didn’t know him by name or anything about his life. So, I went to a couple of exhibitions—one in London and one in at Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, which is a gallery on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital where Louis Wain might have actually stayed for part of his life.

On the surface of it, you’ve got these fun tableaus of cats behaving a bit like people playing ping pong, snooker and gambling but occasionally there will be a little inscription or the story of the cartoon will play out in a way that betrays an underlying vulnerability and fragility of the artist. The more I read about his life, the more I fell in love with him a little bit. I felt like he led a very inspiring life; I found him to be a very inspiring human being.

The shorthand pitch for this was that before Louis Wain’s pictures, nobody in the UK kept cats as pets. They were considered vermin. Maybe in a pub, you’d have a cat to catch mice. But nobody really kept them as pets. He made them cute and cuddly. He was like the cat meme guy long before cat memes were a thing. Suddenly, everyone saw that they were fun and approachable. I was more interested in him as a human being than as a historical figure. I feel that success—or the lack of it—is a part of his story, but it’s not the whole of it.

When you’re telling a story about somebody who really lived, you feel a certain kind of responsibility, and we all felt that way. Benedict (Cumberbatch) wanted this to be an empathetic treatment of Louis Wain. I just really wanted to understand him and help the audience to understand him. He was a complicated man, it’s fair to say, with a complicated mind, and I find that, in part, his courage was contending with that as well as the personal tragedies that befell him. That was my initial way in.

Dawson: Wain had the foresight or understanding that when photography began to seep into the magazine world leading to less need for his illustrations, he moved on to his cat pictures.

Sharpe: I don’t know how consciously he made that decision but he definitely was ducking and weaving to the fashions of the time.

One of the things about how bad he was about his finances is shown in the film as the comedy and tragedy of his family dynamic. Because he was the only male in a house full of women, by default it was understood that he had to be the breadwinner. Yet because of his personality and how he was, he probably was least qualified to do that. The story of Caroline (portrayed by Andrea Riseborough), his oldest sister, is about the frustration of that, and the resulting rage at times.

Sometimes in period films, the presentation of (female characters) can be very prim and uptight but everyone in this film is quite messy and human. I especially like how emotional Caroline is, which you don’t often see in period dramas.

Dawson: Speaking of your cast, it was quite an ensemble of A-list actors.

Sharpe: I feel incredibly lucky and grateful to have worked with so many amazing people. Benedict was attached already to this as a producer as well (as star), so I was super-excited to meet with him. I feel like he’s the perfect person to play Louis Wain. He brings a great humanity to him. I was fascinated to join in his preparation process. For example, he brought a lot of breadth and depth and detail into the rehearsal process—where he was deciding how Louis would walk and talk, as well as how he danced and did the two-handed drawing style that he was famous for.

Dawson: That was remarkable that he actually learned to do that for the role.

Sharpe: He’s actually quite a good artist anyway, but he was keen to nail down (the two-handed drawing). With all of that preparation, on set he was able to get straight into a flow and behave quite instinctively.

With Claire (Foy), I remember thinking how Emily (Wain’s wife) would need to make a strong impact—a lasting impact—in a relatively short amount of time. We needed to care about her, miss her and mourn her through the difficult part of Louis’ life. When I was going through the script, I wanted to figure out the details about her: what were her flaws, why did she want to become a governess? I wanted her to play an active part in their relationship and make it a mutual romance thing.

I liked how they both had to make personal sacrifices to be together—I thought that was a really romantic part of their story. As soon as I talked to Claire about this, which initially was on the phone, I almost felt like I was talking with Emily. She just has this way of making it look easy. Both she and Benedict are graceful performers in how they balance the light and the dark. What was really magical was when we got them together in the rehearsal room. Particularly some of the intimate scenes, it affected how I chose to shoot them as well, just keeping it very simple and letting the performances speak for themselves. I had so much confidence in them to carry the heart of this film.

Dawson: How did you cope with all the cats—40 of them at times— on set?

Sharpe: We all had to kind of get into cat mode. As we headed into the film, we made a point of saying that when the cats are on-set, we needed to be quiet. No sudden movement and no loud noises were allowed because that could spook them. It could spook them for life and many of these cats are professional actors. We just had to plan it carefully and talk with the cat wrangler to find the boundaries of what was possible and what wasn’t. The kittens weren’t particularly aware they were on a film set; they were just really instinctive and playful. Sometimes it worked and sometimes they just weren’t up for it, so we either had to adapt or move on. A cat is still a cat even when it’s been trained to do certain things, so sometimes we just had to change the plan.

We all grew fond of the cats. Many of them were from the same cat wrangler. The cat show day was when many of our supporting artists who were also cat owners were on set. We needed to source cats who looked right but also were confident in this kind of environment. Some of them were show cats.  That’s when we had the most visiting cats. But, generally, we rotated about 20 cats. One of our producers loved the kitten, Peter, so very much that he adopted him.

Dawson: You also had Olivia Colman come in and serve as narrator. You’ve worked with her before and you’re working with her again. Has she become your muse?

Sharpe: With Louis Wain, I knew we a narrator who could very delicately navigate the slightly wry, objective, humorous ironic tone, but also bring tenderness and warmth when it was called for. I knew that Olivia would able to bring that lightness of touch and have the cheek, but also be really kind and warmhearted in the right moments.

With the film as a whole, we were trying as much as possible to draw from Louis Wain’s own world—his visual world but also his tone in some of his writing and the work he illustrated. Alongside that, I wanted there to be a slightly modern edge, so I wasn’t too concerned about getting too fussy about language or even the physicality, and so on.

Olivia has that so I feel we have something that feels current and alive and exciting. I was really chuffed when she agreed to do it. I sometimes like to think of the narrator as a cat. I also wanted (the narrator) to be a woman because we’ve gotten used to this avuncular narrator figure and I thought it would be interesting and beneficial for it not to be that.