EIFF 2022: Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson on A Cat Called Dom

Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson, whether as a duo or going solo, have long been two of the most exciting filmmakers working in Scotland. They make their feature debut with A Cat Called Dom, a thrilling blend of animation, doc and meta-fiction

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 08 Aug 2022
  • A Cat Called Dom

In the year that Edinburgh International Film Festival’s annual Michael Powell Award is retooled to become the Powell and Pressburger Award, there’s something fitting about Scotland’s most innovative filmmaking partnership earning a place in the competition with their debut feature. Animators Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson have been working together since they were students at Edinburgh College of Art in the early 2010s. They both have fruitful solo careers but there is an undeniable alchemy when the pair put their heads together, like on award-winning projects The Making of Longbird (2011) and Monkey Love Experiments (2014). Their latest collab, A Cat Called Dom, has been eight years in the making. The cute title suggests something lighthearted but the incident that incited its inception is as serious as it gets: Anderson’s mother had just been diagnosed with mouth cancer.

Will Anderson: "We had both just made our first professional film [Monkey Love Experiments] and we had done some student work that had done all right [they won a bloody BAFTA!], so we were feeling gung-ho about making films and this thing happened. It shook me pretty hard and it felt like the only thing I could really do to deal with it was to make a film about it."

The pair are no strangers to mining their own lives for inspiration. Anderson’s recent short Betty was a heart-on-sleeve analogy for a messy breakup and the debut film from Henderson, I Am Tom Moody, about a musician going through an existential crisis, was partly inspired by his short career as a pop star. Was there any trepidation, though, in exploring this taboo subject?

WA: "It was a little awkward. But this is the way Ainslie and I communicate with the world. I quite genuinely didn't know how else to react to the fear of losing my mom. So in my head, we were just kinda doing our job, and I was trying to express how I felt as best I could. But that got muddy.
It’s not just emotions that got muddy. The form of the film is also dizzyingly complex, blending fiction, documentary and animation."

Ainslie Henderson: "I think it started out as more of a fiction film. I remember at the beginning, Will and I had a lot of conversations about how to span that gap between how contrived and written it is, and how much we follow a kind of an improvisational style, where you react to what you're exposed to, like you would in documentary."

Watching The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary documentary about the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, was a major inspiration.

AH: "It's an amazing film and ended up being quite a reference because that too is a documentary about making films about something that was very, very real. I think we tried to script Dom a lot more at the beginning. We talked about it being scripted scenes that we were going to do with Will and his family, and then we were going to also just capture what came out of those scripted scenes not working. But then, as time went on, I think it became more of a doc."

These animators slipping into the documentary genre isn’t the left turn it first appears. A Cat Called Dom does very much feel apiece with earlier work, particularly The Making of Longbird. That was a mockumentary about an animator – Anderson – becoming exacerbated when he loses control of his uncooperative animated character and Dom explores similar territory.

WA: "Oh, it’s totally about control, or losing it. The ultimate losing control is someone slipping away from you. So the film is just a way of clinging on I think.
But I'm happy with the way it worked out, and not to spoil anything, but I’m happy with the way that it failed too. That's sort of part of the story: it’s accepting that you can't control everything, and how you have to just give in to it and try to be honest about what's happening."

Is that a tricky thing to admit as animators? After all, it is the most fastidious of film forms.

AH: "Yes, it's maniacal the control that animators have. It's obsessive, actually. When you're controlling every frame of a film, we do tend to get into patterns of being quite uptight about it. So there's definitely a thread of the film that's like, if animation is about having absolute control, what happens when we don't? It's about marrying those two things: of not having control and there being some spontaneous alive thing that you can't control and how those mesh together."

WA: "That's like documentary meeting fiction. That's exactly what you're describing."

AH: "I think that's something that Will and I share. We're always looking for ways of making animation a little looser and a little more spontaneous and throwing elements in there that shake it up. You can get so obsessed about making things perfect that it becomes a bit tyrannical at times and a bit dulled."

The animated element of A Cat Called Dom is the title character: a small black cat who grows from a single malfunctioning pixel in the bottom corner of Anderson’s laptop. Is he an analogy for the cancerous cells growing in Anderson’s mum? Or simply Anderson's alter-ego?

WA: "I started to think of him as a bit like the elephant in the room. He's asking me the obvious questions. 'Well, why aren't you just there? Why don't you go and spend time with your mom? Why don't you tell her how much you love her?'"

AH: ​​"He's a few things, wasn't he? He was that, and he was  – and I hesitate to say this because it's a contentious and possible offensive idea – the embodiment of what's good about cancer. But if there is something good that comes out of cancer, that's what we wanted Dom to symbolise."

The 'good thing' Henderson is alluding to is how this devastating illness can be a wake-up call to appreciate your loved ones while you can. And we’re pleased to hear Anderson’s mum, who's in remission, will be with him for a good time longer.

WA: "I certainly thought she was leaving us and then she fought through it. She's tough. I’m just very thankful to be in this situation where I can still communicate with my mother and have maybe grown even closer through a little scare like this. I feel very lucky."


A Cat Called Dom screens at Cameo, 13 Aug, 5.30pm; Filmhouse, 19 Aug, 7pm; tickets at edfilmfest.org.uk