Fresh off a spate of Best Animated Feature awards from critics groups, Flow director Gints Zilbalodis made time for a Hassle chat, discussing his incredible story of a brave little cat in an unknowable world. (This interview has been lightly edited for, uh, flow).
BOSTON HASSLE: How has the world tour been? I’ve noticed it’s been at essentially every festival, which is exciting.
GINTS ZILBALODIS: Yeah, it’s pretty intense. Basically, I finished the film right before Cannes in May, which was very stressful. And since Cannes, it’s been almost non-stop going from festival to festival. I haven’t even counted, but I think it’s more than twenty that I’ve attended so far, and I still have many more to go. But it’s great, after spending years and years working on the film with a small team, actually going out and seeing how audiences respond. In many festivals we’re the only animated film shown, so it’s nice to see these boundaries being blurred with animation– not just being set on the sidelines, being considered as equal to any film.
BH: Yeah, I’m a big animation person, so I was seeking it out because I saw it on the TIFF list. I’m always really interested to see anything outside of the studio system be animated because it’s always– I don’t have to tell you, but it seems extremely time consuming and very perfectionist-based, and it always has to be a labor of love. So I’m always excited to see how these things develop.
What is the animation process for Flow? It’s 3D animated, but is it being painted each frame? Because it looks very watercolor-y to me. I assume there was some sort of technique you had been using, but I wasn’t sure what.
GZ: Without going too much into technical detail, it’s not exactly painted, but every frame is really designed. It’s not just random. Every light, we use all kinds of lights and different textures. It’s quite complicated when the camera is moving a lot. It’s a lot easier when you have static close-up shots, but you have these wide angle shots, which are sometimes very long. It’s quite tricky to paint that graphic look. It was important that it has that graphic look, because this more realistic style we’ve seen so much, I think I’m getting tired of it. People are seeking something new. It’s cool to see that there’s multiple different styles being explored in bigger films. But I think in a smaller film, a more independent film like Flow, we have more freedom to do that, more flexibility. And I wanted to have these imperfections, where even though it’s made in the computer, we see some brush strokes. We only put detail where it’s really necessary.
GZ: It’s like another tool to kind of guide the audience where they should look at, almost like focus with a camera, where some things are more abstracted than others. We’re designing a bunch of tools and textures and shaders. Compared to my previous film, I think this is somewhat more detailed. You see the grass, all these different plants and the water, which was really hard to do. Water animation is one of the hardest things. We had to develop all kinds of new tools for that. I wanted the characters to feel almost undrawn in some way. We don’t render every hair on them. We create this kind of stylized silhouette, which suggests the foreground. And this allows us, I think, to be more expressive with the designs and the performances.
BH: There was such a physicality and it’s always interesting to see. These characters don’t have thumbs, but they have to work on this boat together. How did you strike the balance with the characters– the cat, the capybara, the dog and everyone– between them acting like animals and letting them sort of make more active choices? Because it seems like they’re sort of in between, like the cat freaks out of water and it’s just kind of getting into trouble, but then seems to sort of understand the danger and the need to be on the boat. And I mean, none of them understand what’s going on, but it just feels like it goes back and forth of just like when they are able to overcome their own instincts and not. And I just wasn’t sure how you approach that.
GZ: There wasn’t a concrete guideline. It was a case by case kind of matter, where I wanted them to feel as grounded as possible, but we’re not making a documentary. I’m not interested in that. We’re telling a story, but all these personalities, they’re based on the core characteristics of these animals, how the cat is independent and the dog is friendly. So we’re not adding some random personality on them, but everything’s built around that. But then we’re kind of creating these situations where they behave almost contradictory to their instincts. We create these archetypes, but then we push them and challenge them to behave in unconventional ways, which I find interesting and break these stereotypes. Maybe in the beginning of the film, it’s more grounded, but once they get in the boat and we need to show how they behave, we can’t use dialogue. We have to do that through the behavior, the decisions they make. And so it was important that these characters have agency, that they have decisions, they’re also difficult, there’s no easy answer to them. And we see some of them respond differently to them. So we have to push some of this behavior, but because our goal is to do that gradually, where it starts out really being grounded, and then we push the behavior a little bit more.
BH: That makes sense. It starts out very grounded because the cat is in his empty house, but then you sit with him more and you’re just like, what happened here? And then the water comes, and he’s like, oh no, there’s a flood. But then the flood is above the trees, and you’re just like, okay, this is not normal, and the world really builds that way. What was your inspiration for the setup of this world? It really reminded me of Shadow of the Colossus, where you’re kind of just dropped into this space that feels empty, but is so full of just like something’s going on, where you’re just like, where am I right now?
GZ: Yeah, I think it’s fun to start in the middle of something and let the audience kind of figure out what happens. And not with words, but through environments and leaving a bunch of clues for them to pick up. They have to actively participate in the storytelling. They have to pay attention. And maybe they will not catch everything on the first watch, which is fine. They should focus on the character. But if you rewatch it, you might figure out what happened before the story began and what happens after. But you’re kind of experiencing this from the cat’s point of view, so the cat doesn’t really understand this, and so the audience also isn’t told what happened. But I wanted this world to feel kind of timeless. There’s no modern day technology or skyscrapers or cell phones. And it’s not really set in the real world. It’s kind of two preferences for three places to kind of combine them and make something new to help us [understand the] story and help us understand these characters. The world isn’t as important to me as the characters. So it’s all there for a reason. I didn’t write a long history of what happened; it’s all there to help us convey what the cat is feeling, and to challenge it and to create these obstacles, which they need to either work together to overcome or which creates conflict between them to kind of set them apart. I start with the idea of the emotion that I need to convey, and then I try to reverse engineer it and figure out a reason why a thing like that or a place like that would exist.
BH: The setting really serves to amplify what the cat is feeling, where the cat is like, “I’m alone, I’m in danger, but I can’t trust anyone, but maybe I can a little bit, but also I shouldn’t.” I’m just really impressed with how it looks and how everything came together. Is there anything you really learned while making Flow that you think you’ll carry into your next film?
GZ: For Flow, we had to actually establish a studio and figure out the whole pipeline and everything, so the next one should be a lot easier and faster because we have that. I think I will focus more on the storytelling rather than spending a lot of time doing a bunch of technical things. I learned a lot, but I think I will trust others to do that. I’ll try to delegate more on the next project.
BH: Just like the cat.
GZ: My first feature I made myself, and now I’m trying to delegate more and more with each of the films. I’ve kind of learned how to trust others and how to communicate, convey my ideas to others, and let them translate that. And because we work with so many people who are much better than me, I understand the basics of sound, but I can’t do what the sound designer does. It’s helpful that I’ve kind of done it. I know the basics, and I think it’s good for directors to actually try doing all these different things. It’s pretty fast to learn the basics, but to become an expert, it takes a long time. My first film, Away, was my unofficial film school where I learned everything. And this film as well, only after finishing it, I think I understand how to do it because we’re really learning all this stuff. I never worked with a team, and my producer had never done animation, and many of the crew members, it was their first experience of working in a team like this. Many of them had worked independently. Now I feel like only after finishing do we know what we’re doing.
BH: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what sort of animation really inspired you when you were either first starting out or when you were a kid? Where did you decide, I’m going to do that? Because I’m always interested because everyone has different first times.
GZ: I don’t have one single experience, but there’s a bunch of films inspired by Miyazaki and Ghibli. I couldn’t name a single film because it’s all part of a bigger body of work. But it’s actually more live action films than animation. Maybe the way the filmmakers use the camera to tell the story, not just do conventional coverage of close-ups and wide shots. Have each shot be very specifically designed and be very expressive with the camera and the editing. And I feel like with a film like this, without dialogue, you can be more expressive. I have to think about some examples. There’s Alfonso Cuaron, Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, Hitchcock. All kinds of filmmakers. I think a film like this could only be done in animation because they’re animals and they’re in water and you can’t really ask a cat to do certain things. It does what it wants.
BH: I was very stressed out for the cat because I didn’t know what was going to happen. So I am excited to watch it again to know the cat’s going to be fine. Whatever’s going on with the world, not my problem. But I’m just like, the cat’s okay. I can focus more on just how everything looks. Like you said, water is the hardest thing to animate, so it’s so impressive that this movie takes place during a flood.
GZ: Because we understand the cat’s fear of water. We don’t have to explain it. Before our premiere in Latvia, we had a big flood. Our studio was flooded as well. It was just in Spain for a festival and there was a big flood as well.
BH: It’s following you.
GZ: It’s kind of scary. But it also allows us to tell the story without antagonists. It’s really nature that’s creating all this conflict. I want these animals, these characters to be kind of flawed in their way, but they’re relatable as well. I didn’t want just good characters and bad characters. So I think that’s more interesting.
BH: I was thinking about that with the dog. The dog really feels like he has the most conflict because he wants to help everyone but his buddies are just kind of like… they’re dogs. He pulls a couple of faces when they mess up the lemur’s stuff. He’s just like, “Sorry, guys. You know how my buddies are.” I just found it so funny and interesting. It felt like a much more pro-cat movie than pro-dog movie in that way.
GZ: I love both cats and dogs. Because maybe this is a story told from the cat’s point of view. The story is kind of guiding how we portray these characters. Maybe I will do a dog movie next to have an opposite point of view. But let me say this one dog doesn’t follow just the group– it thinks for itself. So that was important. Showing that the cat is on this journey from being independent to working together and the dog is actually learning the opposite thing. It becomes more independent to kind of show the good and the bad of both of these things.
Flow
2024
dir. Gints Zilbalodis
84 min.
Opens Friday, 12/6 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Capitol Theatre (Arlington), Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, and AMC Boston Common
