Kitty: Trailer for Chloe Sevigny's directorial debut about a girl who turns into a cat

It's a whole different world away from Kevin Spacey's feline transformation act in Nine Lives, that's for sure

There's always a healthy dose of trepidation behind any actor's first turn behind the camera: breeding ground of triumphs, and crushing failures so bracingly placed in the public eye.

It's certainly no different for Chloë Sevigny; whose reputation as an absolute pillar of cool and star of a consistently daring, original cinema has made her switch to directing a particularly daunting task. Whenever Sevigny puts her name to anything, expectations rise sky high. "I’ve been wanting to direct Kitty for 20 years,” she told Indiewire. "My enthusiasm has waxed and waned. That had a lot to do with my confidence and schedule and where I was in my life."

Yet, Sevigny's finally taken the leap: her 15-minute short Kitty is making the rounds on the festival circuit, with its first trailer debuting on the star's Instagram page.

Described as possessing a "fairy tale-ish, otherworldly" tone, the film adapts Paul Bowles' short story of the same name, in which a young girl (played by newcomer Edie Yvonne) transforms from curious youngster to excitable kitten; spurring the utter despair of her mother (Ione Skye), who can't even fathom the change that's come over her daughter.

"I guess I felt misunderstood in a lot of ways," Sevigny told Refinery 29 about the film's tale of a girl nobody believes. "Of course, I was always heard, having been in the public eye. People always want you to say more, but it was almost like I wanted to hide more as a result. People wanted me to speak as a voice of a generation, and I had no interest in doing that. I didn’t want that responsibility."

"I wanted to do kind of a throwback to kind of those 80s films where they had an element of practical effects and makeup and stuff,” she added. “I thought it was so visual and cinematic and so delicate I could make a really beautiful whisper of a film."