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 the nine stages of his own unique filmmaking journey

AS TOLD TO IAN FREER

The cat just about keeps afloat;

A fascinating object catches the lemur’s eye.

Setting sail

The capybara and cat forge a tentative camaraderie;

The secretary bird and the golden retriever find their sea legs.

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, sevenminute, 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.

2ASSEMBLING

The hero cat is based on two cats.The first one —who Aqua is also 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 has similar trust issues.

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.