Taylor Swift reveals her dad's contribution to upcoming film 'Cats'

The soon to be released Taylor Swift starrer 'Cats' has a rather interesting bit of story behind the trippy catnip scene that featured in its trailer. As it turns out, the catnip scene was the ingenious idea of her dad who usually doesn't shy away from pitching his inputs at Swift's meetings with her directors.

In the Universal Studios production, Swift can be seen chilling out on a hammock and sprinkling catnip over a bunch of dazed and rejoicing felines at the Jellicle Ball. Swift told Variety how this unusual sequence made its way into the movie and subsequently in its trailer. Tom Hooper, the director of the movie flew to Nashville, Tennessee for a meeting with Swift to show her the footage of the film in which she is transformed into a fur-clad cat using "digital fur technology".

"It's an amazing thing. Tom Hooper flew to Nashville to show us the demo of what we would look like as cats, which I still think is the coolest thing I've ever seen. And you know how we're going to have tails added and ears that move and whiskers and all that stuff?" the singer-actor told Variety.

To his surprise, the director found Taylor's mom and dad in the meeting room and while the presentation went forward, as if in a moment of creative epiphany, her dad urged Hooper to include a montage in which a bunch of cats are going haywire while intoxicated on catnip.

In her interview with Variety, Taylor described her dad as an extremely sociable person who tries to come up with his own ideas for his daughter's movies.

"My dad is the most social, friendly man in the world. He has lots of ideas. When I was a kid, I'd have these meetings and I needed a parental chaperone. My dad would always, in the middle of the meeting, have an idea he'd want to tell people about. I'd be like: 'Dad, Dad stop!'" she explained.

Hooper had no clue what catnip was, so they pulled out videos of cats tripping on catnip from YouTube. Hooper found the idea so impressive that he agreed instantly to include something on similar lines in the movie.

The multi-starrer 'Cats' that will hit the American and UK theatres on 20 December is an adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Weber's hit stage musical of the same name. Apart from Swift, the cast includes big names like James Corden, Judi Dench, and Idris Elba.