Director Gints Zilbalodis on how ‘Flow' is flooding awards season and making Latvia proud
Last month, Flow received two Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature, which filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis now calls 'a nice surprise.' To 'relieve [his] stress' that morning when the noms were being announcement live, 'it helped to pet [his] dog,' he recalls with a smile.
The Latvian movie contains no dialogue as it follows the journey of a small black cat who becomes displaced from its home after an end-of-days-type flood. The feline doesn't have an official name, though Zilbalodis enjoys that some fans have started calling it 'Flow.' Along the way, the cat learns to work together with a quirky group of strangers (a Labrador Retriever, a capybara, a secretarybird, and a ring-tailed lemur) in order to survive the elements. Flow recently won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature and two Annie Awards for Best Independent Feature and Best Writing.
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In his home country, 'Everyone is following every single bit of news that comes out of this awards season,' Zilbalodis states proudly (watch our exclusive video interview above). 'Everything ends up on the front page of the biggest newspapers. I brought the Globe back home, and the National Museum of Art in Latvia wanted to exhibit it, so of course we agreed. They put it in this central entrance of the museum, and it was guarded by these two cat statues, which fits the theme of the film. There were so many people coming to see the Golden Globe, they were waiting for an hour in line to see it.'
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Flow is the first film that Zilbalodis has worked on with a team, so how did that change his personal style of filmmaking? 'When I'm working alone, I don't need to explain anything to anyone. I can just make it,' he says. 'This time, when I was working with a team, I needed to articulate my thoughts. And these ideas could be challenged or questioned, and that can be healthy for filmmaking.' However, he concedes, 'That can also go too far. I think there's a danger of over-explaining everything and losing the things that make it interesting and unique. So, there were certain moments where I had to ask the team to trust me.'
Fans often approach Zilbalodis and ask him to 'explain certain scenes,' particularly when it comes to the flood and the absence of humans. But he rather enjoys the mystery of it all. 'I kind of want to leave those questions up to interpretation,' he confesses. 'If I had explained these things, then no one would be talking about this. It's exciting to have discussions like that. I'm really more guided by emotion and experience, rather than logic. I want to create a sense of conveying that the cat is sad … and then I built an entire world to express this feeling.'
The filmmaker used the open-source software Blender to create Flow, which he explains, 'Any kid can pick up and now has the access to tools that these big feature films' are utilizing. 'It's free, and there are resources online. We just learned from watching YouTube videos. This already has been a very exciting change for more and more independent films. We can make these films with a smaller budget. These tools are not a compromise in any way. It's just as good, or even better, than some of the very expensive tools out there.'
Also in our exclusive video interview, Zilbalodis talks about some of his biggest inspirations in the film industry, including Hayao Miyazaki, Alfonso Cuarón, Sergio Leone, Martin Scorsese, and Akira Kurosawa, how he cowrote the score without ever 'studying music,' and how Conan O'Brien is the 'perfect person' to host the 97th Academy Awards. Plus, he teases what he can about his next project, which he's working on whenever he has a free moment during awards season.
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