In Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow, a cat travels through a flooded, hazardous, post-human landscape, putting those feline survival skills to good use. Here, the Latvian director recounts to Empire's Ian Freer the nine stages of his own unique filmmaking journey.
1) Embarking
I think my personality is like a cat.
I want to be independent and do things my own way. After making my first feature, Away [2019, about a boy being chased by a monster], I had an opportunity to work on a bigger scale and so thought I should make a story about me figuring out how to collaborate. It wasn’t something I had past experience with; it was something I was going through in that moment.
When I was 15 I made a simple, seven-minute, hand-drawn short, Aqua, about a cat’s fear of water. When I decided to revisit this premise for a feature version, I wanted to focus more on the cat’s fear of others, of relationships. Flow is the first time I’ve worked with a team. I just thought a cat would be the perfect protagonist for a story of starting out alone, then learning how to work together.
The cat learns to trust others, but I didn’t want to have a simple arc where it learns lessons and everything is solved. I wanted to show that, even though it overcomes some of these fears and becomes braver, it still has these anxieties. It learns to accept them and live with them, but I was looking for something that felt more like real life: you do learn things, but, in some ways, you stay the same as well.
2) Assembling
The hero cat is based on two cats. The first one – who Aqua is based on – is a cat I had in high school called Josephine. She was a stray when we found her, and for that reason, she kept her guard up. I guess the cat in the film had similar trust issues.
It was like a casting process, looking at different animals and imagining their chemistry.
Josephine had very fluffy fur but that is very hard to animate and render so we didn’t use that. I had a second cat, Oigars (pronounced Oy-gash), who was Josephine’s son. He was a lot more trusting, almost like a dog in some ways, very friendly, but we only had him for a year. It was a very sad moment when he passed away, which was the inspiration for this impending doom, this cataclysmic flood that washes everything away and forces the cat to take refuge on a battered sailboat. Visually, Oigars looked more like the cat in our story.
The cat befriends a number of animals on the boat: a golden retriever (based on my two dogs, Tiger and Audrey), a capybara, a South African secretary bird and a lemur. While writing the script, it was like a casting process, looking at different animals and imagining their chemistry if you put them together. It also highlights one of the film’s key themes: the desire to find a group who accepts you for who you are.
3) Flooding
The cat’s fear of water feels very universal; you don’t need to explain to anyone why cats don’t like water. To bring out this fear in a very scary way, I thought it should be a flood.
I don’t know exactly where the humans went or where the flood is coming from because the cat doesn’t know these things. I wanted to stay in the cat’s point of view. So you start with this emotional feeling, and then reverse-engineer it and figure out the logic for these places to be there. I want to focus on things that I feel are important, which are the characters and their relationships. I don’t want to waste time on lore or exposition.
I understand these images evoke ideas around climate change but I didn’t want to preach a didactic message. My feeling is if you show some bleak documentary about natural disasters, maybe it would only be seen by a small audience and by people who already care about these issues. But if there’s this fun escapade with cute animals, it can actually reach a bigger audience and may have a bigger impact. Sometimes I feel you can find a truth more through fiction than non-fiction.
4) Building
There are no humans in Flow. And no dialogue. Journalists often ask me, “Is it difficult to make a film with no dialogue?” It is difficult, but I think it’s actually tougher to tell stories with dialogue. I tend to think of visuals first — it feels more natural to me. Without characters speaking, I can be more expressive with all the other tools of cinema. I’m forced to come up with an original way of telling the story. I can’t just have them speak about it. I have to use the environment, the camera, music and sound to convey all these feelings.
On their journey through the flood, our animals see half-submerged ancient temples, but also maybe newer-looking buildings from the early 20th century. I wanted it to feel timeless, so there are no big, glass skyscrapers — hopefully it will still feel fresh many years from now. We’re making an alternative version of our world. Of course, we were studying real places and combining them to make something new. But I wanted it to have this sense of wonder — we see the city is being flooded and these fish swimming underwater in the streets — which means we’re seeing these things for the first time, and we feel curiosity about them, just like the cat does. It really helps us get into its mindset.
5) Designing
I didn’t do a lot of concept art for the main characters. I would just model them directly in 3D. I deliberately didn’t want to have too much detail, because you might lose some of the expressiveness and appeal if you made it too hyper-real, as some other animated films do. I wanted it to feel handmade, with these brush strokes and these imperfections. I describe our approach as naturalism rather than realism. The difference is we are studying real life, referencing it, but we’re not copying it. We’re interpreting real life and telling a story.
I wanted to do a lot of long takes where the camera is very close, following the characters. It has this handheld movement as if a real person is operating and reacting to things, and not able to catch everything perfectly. I didn’t do any storyboards because this approach is really hard to draw, because of all the perspective changes. There are two shots that are each around five minutes long, and the camera is moving through the environment. Because the camera is very close to the ground and we see the grass and all the detail really up close, it had to be incredibly detailed. Some of those scenes got really heavy and our computers struggled to render all that.
6) Flowing
It’s often said filmmakers should never work with animals and water — at least our movie doesn’t have kids! The water in Flow is a storytelling technique. At first, when the cat is afraid of others, the water is also very scary and aggressive. Later, as the cat and the other animals come together, the water becomes more tranquil and peaceful. Water can be a metaphor, a very expressive way to communicate the cat’s internal fears. But water is so hard to control, even in animation, where you can control everything. You have to understand the physics to be able to master it. I can’t really do that, but luckily, I had people who can.
I think I’ll avoid water in the next film.
Usually on animated films, there’s a big team designing all these water effects, but in our case, it was just two people. We had to develop new tools to do this. There’s no one way of rendering water. It could be a small puddle, a river or a lake or a stormy sea — each of these needs a different technique and a different system. What is really tricky is to have the camera going in and out of the water within the same shot. The water was one of the first things we started working on, and one of the last things we finished before the premiere. I think I’ll avoid water in the next film.
7) Listening
I didn’t actually study music and I don’t play any instruments, but I write these simple, minimalistic themes on my laptop, which can feel more evocative. I write the music as I am writing the script because I don’t want it to feel like an afterthought. I’m not thinking about specific scenes for most of the time, I’m just playing and making discoveries. I created a lot of material — seven hours of music — but we ended up using only 50 minutes. So, when I’m designing the shots, I can choose multiple options.
Writing the music also gives me ideas for scenes. There’s this climactic scene with the cat and the bird up in the sky. This was really inspired by music, because I knew they would be going there, but I couldn’t actually figure out what would happen. I had found this piece of music that felt both triumphant, but also melancholic, creating a bittersweet emotion. I felt like I could express these feelings more with music, even if I couldn’t even articulate them at first.
Later we brought in Rihards Zaļupe, a more experienced composer, and re-recorded most of the score with real instruments and an orchestra. If I used a piece of music to introduce the cat or the dogs, he would take these motifs and intertwine them in other scenes so it is more coherent, and these themes come back in to add multiple layers. It was one of my favourite processes. Music is so fast compared to animation; you get an immediate emotion, but it’s so strong as well.
Five-and-a-half years didn’t feel like a long time. It felt like we just barely made it.
There are also long scenes with no music. I thought sound designer Gurwal [Coïc-Gallas] would be excited to have this opportunity, but he was actually quite anxious to have this responsibility. He couldn’t hide behind the dialogue or music. For the voices, we didn’t want to use humans mimicking animals, because then it would feel too cartoony. What I found interesting, and which I didn’t know before, is that cats have different types of voices; you can’t just mix and match them. Gurwal recorded his own cat. Gurwal’s cat is usually quite chatty, always meowing. But when he pointed a microphone at it, it shut up. He had to hide microphones all over his house and record it secretly. I was pleased I was not the only one who struggles with dialogue.
8) Believing
I have been working on Flow for five-and-a-half years. It’s been intense. The budget is small [€3.5 million], 50 times smaller than a Disney film, but even compared to some independent European films, it’s tight. People always ask if animators are patient, but I feel like you’re always in a rush. You are running a marathon at a sprint pace. I could just keep going and improve the film, but sometimes you need to have the deadline just to move on. It didn’t feel like a long time. It felt like we just barely made it.
There were times where I felt like I’d bitten off more than I could chew. During the writing, I wasn’t sure if people would understand the story, if the ending is clear, or if it got across what I intended. I had never worked as an animator as an employee and now I was in charge of a team. I felt the director should know what they want, and be able to express these ideas clearly. I felt this imposter syndrome because I actually didn’t know what I wanted, but I realised that most directors probably don’t know initially what they want. You have to put the work in — that’s the lesson I learned. I had doubts throughout this process, and only when we had the music and the animation and the lighting, and everything came together, did I feel confident that it worked.
9) Enjoying
The film premiered at Cannes, which was really special because they very rarely select animated films. It’s great that these boundaries between animation and other types of films seem to be blurring, as they should be, because we’re all telling stories; it doesn’t matter what tools you’re using. Many of our team were there for the premiere, so it was quite an emotional screening. We had never watched the finished film with an audience before, only with the team itself, who are not the most objective viewers. It was such a relief that people were laughing at the right moments, and feeling the emotion in the right moments.
To go from sitting behind my desk animating this film to meeting hundreds and hundreds of people was really exciting, but also a big change in my lifestyle. And I’m incredibly honoured to have received BAFTA and Academy Award nominations. This is the first time that a film from Latvia has received either, which makes many of us here very proud.
Because it’s not hyper-real animation and there are gaps in detail in terms of the visuals, I think the audience can project their own experiences onto the film. They see their own pets in this story and they also see their own fears. We are looking to relate to characters, we’re looking to see ourselves on the screen and to experience it in a cinema, with a group of strangers that make you feel less alone.
I made Aqua when I was 15, and now I’m 30, so I have been thinking about this cat’s story for half of my life. I spent a lot of time figuring out the plot, but it’s really about the experience and the emotion. You only get that sense when you actually pay attention. And if you do, I think you will be rewarded with an escape from your reality for an hour-and-a-half. You go on this journey and feel what it’s like to be a cat. I think that’s what’s amazing about films — you can experience life from different points of view and feel what it’s like to live them. Hopefully Josephine would approve.
Flow it out now in UK cinemas. This article was originally published in the April 2025 issue of Empire.