The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Flow.

What is it like finally bringing a film into the world after you’ve been working on it for close to five years?

Gints Zilbalodis: Well, I finished the film like days before going to Cannes. It was a very stressful few weeks get it to the finish line. And I hadn’t even seen it with an audience, only with the team, which is not a very objective audience. It’s been very intense, and very strange, sitting in a room by yourself for such a long time and then going to twenty or thirty places and meeting crowds of people. But it’s cool. And it’s being distributed widely. I think it’s the most widely distributed Latvian film, which we’re very happy about.

Matiss Kaza: We’re very proud that this movie can represent Latvian and Baltic Cinema on a larger scale because these countries are sometimes ignored by the bigger festivals. That’s because they don’t have like something like a wave associated with them, like Romania had in the 2000s or something like that. What we’re hoping for is that this will be the first of many films from the Baltics to get noticed internationally. I hope that this can start a new movement in that direction and that people will pay attention to movies from our region. And for me, it’s the first animated film I produced and co-wrote, so everything is new. But that’s what’s interesting. And we’ve made some mistakes along the way, but now we know what not to do next time!

The animals need to have agency

If you made mistakes, I didn’t see any. It’s remarkable that it’s your first animation. Tell us more about that.

MK: My experience before this film was mostly live action and documentary films—directing, writing, and producing. Gints initially asked me to come on board this project as a co-writer. We worked on the script, and he initially didn’t trust me to produce this film because I’d only produced live action and documentary, and animation is something different. And it is different in the sense that, for example, live action features are extremely chaotic and hectic for the shooting period of maybe thirty or forty days if you’re lucky, right? Whereas this is very calm, but very long. It’s five years, but you can always go back and change something or tweak it if it doesn’t work.

GZ: It’s not at all calm.

MK: Well at the end it wasn’t, but for the most part of the five years it was very calm.

GZ: For you, maybe!  

I read some interviews that you’ve done and it’s remarkable that everybody, it seems, has this desire to interpret the film for you or to hear your interpretation of the film. And I understand that there’s no dialogue, no humans, it’s a cryptic piece in some ways. And I’m wondering how you as filmmakers react when people ask you those questions?

GZ: Yeah, I guess it’s a little bit like asking a comedian to explain why a joke is funny. I often try to explain not the meaning, but how these scenes came together and my intention. I do like to leave some things open. It’s very interesting that some people are very sure that it’s about a certain thing. I never say that it’s not; I allow them to think that. It’s ambiguous because there were certain things that I didn’t care as much about. The things I care about and wanted to focus on are quite clear and definitive, which are the characters and the relationships. I didn’t want to explain the backstory, I didn’t want to waste time doing that, or leaving the cat’s perspective, which would maybe be required to explain certain things. It was important to stay in the cat’s subjective point of view, because the cat doesn’t know where the people went or where the flood came from. That’s where I wanted the audience to be.  

Matiss, as a producer, how is it different talking about the project now than how it was years ago.

MK: Well, now we can show a lot. Back then we had limited material to show. We had the development teaser, and afterwards we had an animatic, but that is also not true to what the final film is. But this is a film that’s better to experience firsthand than to have to listen to someone describe it. When I talk about it now, there’s lots of stuff I can reference. There are also fun anecdotes that I can talk about from the production process because of the unusual approach to a film about animals. In the sense that, it’s kind of opposed to say the Pixar or DreamWorks style of having animals walk on two legs, talk, dance, and sing. There are a few anecdotes that go with creating a movie where the animals behave like animals. They’re semi-anthropomorphized, of course, but still behaving mostly like animals. The French co-producer had to pay people to watch cat videos to do research for the film. And capybara videos! Because many of the shots use footage of animal behavior to make it more naturalistic. And then of course, there’s the story of voicing the animals. Gints, maybe you want to share that fun anecdote?

GZ: There are real animal voices. We didn’t use humans mimicking animals. Our sound designer would try to record his cat. And his cat would actually talk a lot, but whenever he pointed the microphone towards the cat, he would get self-conscious. Such a cat. He had to hide microphones in his closet. It’s interesting because cats actually have different voices. We couldn’t use different cats—they’re very distinctive. For the most part, it’s one cat. Also, with the capybara, our sound designer tried to make it vocalize something, but they’re very silent. So they had to tickle the capybara to make some noise. But that was a very unpleasant sound. It was a very high pitched, kind of anxious voice, which didn’t fit this character. That’s an example where we had to take some artistic liberties. And we cast a different animal! It’s actually a camel that’s voicing the capybara. Sometimes if you represent reality exactly as it is, it can take you out of the moment. Sometimes fiction can be more real than reality.

He sounded just like I thought he would! You guys had to tickle a capybara? Where can we watch this footage?

GZ: I don’t know, it was in France.

MK: See, that’s one of the mistakes we’re going to not make! We’re going to have a lot of behind the scenes footage for the next one.

I love watching the film because I never feel that there’s a rigid set of rules about how the animal must do things. Did you have any internal compass about how they’re going to act compared to real life animals?

GZ: We didn’t have any rules for that. I thought in the beginning of the film that they should act in a rather naturalistic way. And that’s a word that we used, naturalism rather than realism, which means that we’re not copying real life, we’re interpreting it and kind of telling a story. But as the story grows, we gradually have to have them make decisions, because the way we understand these characters is through the behavior and the decisions they make. The animals need to have agency. They can’t just stay in the boat. I wanted them to have complicated decisions where there’s no easy answer.

We also did look at similar situations where they might push something or behave in a similar way. Even for small moments. We would look for references of them just turning their heads or the ear movements. I didn’t know that cats actually don’t move their eyes a lot. They just look around with their heads, and they might just turn their ears, which can be very expressive. We’re telling a story, a personal story, so the behavior of the animals starts out with them being kind of archetypical, or kind of the stereotypical. You’ve got the happy dog and the grumpy cat, and that’s how I start, but then I try to break the stereotype and have them act in contradictory ways, which makes them more interesting. I wanted each of them to be relatable as well, and hopefully they’re flawed in their own way, but there are no antagonists. There are only flawed characters.

Except for that one bird!

GZ: Yeah, but even the bird was just trying to protect its little bird.

This is your second feature, but the first film you’ve done with such a large crew. Can you talk about making that leap?

GZ: It was intentional to tell a story about that experience of me figuring out how to work together, but we wrote the story before production. There was a lot of anxiety, and I was predicting a lot more conflict than we actually ended up with. The process was much smoother than what we see on the screen with the characters fighting and arguing. They say write what you know, but I thought I should write something that I was going through at that time. It’s not something in the past. I had to figure out how to articulate my thoughts, because before I could just have an idea and visualize it myself. This time I had to find words, which can be helpful in making it more intentional. But it also can be tricky because I tried to avoid over explaining certain things. In certain moments, I had to ask the crew to trust me that it’s going to work when we put the music in and when it’s animated. But I can’t really explain certain things. There are certain moments where it was easier for me just to show my intention. We didn’t have storyboard artists, and I designed the shots myself. In those cases, it’s easier and faster just to show rather than explain it to someone else because, also, sometimes I didn’t know what I wanted. It’s a process of discovery. I have to try different things and see if it works. I can’t explain certain things which I don’t know myself. That’s also why I’m doing the music. Because music is so subjective—it could be interpreted very, very differently. I do the music while writing the script, which kind of gives me ideas for the story. But then we brought on another composer, Rihards Zalupe, who has a lot more experience than me and added more layers to the score.

But it was nice not worry about the technical aspects as much as I used to, since we could delegate to other animators. And there are many things that I couldn’t do myself, like the water, which technically is really complicated. It’s for people much smarter than me.