Into The Woods

"It's sort of been an odd trajectory," 26-year-old Matthew Lessner says of his directing career, which began with a debut feature film project last year, and which his led him, somewhat accidentally, to directing music videos for indie darlings the Dirty Projectors and Fool's Gold. "Most of the time, you start off with music videos and then you make some shorts that get into festivals, and then you try to make a feature."

But Lessner, who says he once believed music videos were "just a bunch of nonsense," said he didn't want to fall into a post film school slump while he waited to make his first feature film, The Woods, and decided to get the ball rolling by funding most of the movie himself. When the economy went into a tail-spin that fall, the film ran out of money and production was halted.

Meanwhile, members of the Dirty Projectors had moved into a Greenpoint apartment Lessner had recently moved out of and were shown his work by a former roommate. The band then contacted Lessner to helm their video for "Stillness Is the Move," the single off of their recently released Bitte Orca.

Shot on a Vermont mountaintop, the video features lead singer Dave Longstreth herding a llama up a mountain top, while other members of the band run with huskies and perform synchronized dance moves evocative of the song's early-'90s R&B inflections. Animals and an eye for the fantastical, Lessner says, are a through line in his work.

While The Woods was in limbo, Lessner realized he could pull himself out of a "precarious financial situation" by doing work for other bands. In his video for the Raveonettes' "Last Dance," a terrier pilots a flying rowboat. A group of bikini clad girls stroke a komodo dragon as old men squirt each other with orange soda in the Fool's Gold video for "Surprise Hotel." And in his video for Fires of Rome's song "Set in Stone," Lessner filmed Afghan hounds in slow motion, their long, human-like hair blowing in the wind.

Lessner was able to finance some of the film through his music video work, but most of its new funds were raised through Kickstarter, a micro-fundraising website that allows participants, mostly artists, filmmakers and musicians, to raise money through pledges. Lessner made his goal of $8,000 with donations from about 94 people, and said it was important that the funding of The Woods be kept "truly independent," because it's "what the spirit of the film is about."

The Woods follows a group of young people who, disillusioned by the world's many seemingly unsolvable problems, decide to create a utopian society in the woods. Instead of coming prepared, however, the group comes stocked with cell phones, televisions, other impractical technical gadgetry that, due to eventual apocalyptic occurrences in the outside world, stop working. When a once-charismatic group leader begins to have difficulty using increasingly hollow rhetoric to inspire his followers -- who have since turned to spear fishing with Swiffer mops, and fashioned crude hatchets out of their hard drives -- the story takes a dark turn.

Though Lessner says he only has plans to finish his feature now, he'll likely return to music videos. "For all of my earlier naysaying about music videos I really like doing them because it's a way to be purely visual and really tap into that kind of subconscious and do whatever comes to mind," Lessner says. "Like, that guy shouldn't have any pants on." And, to be sure, Lessner has a few unrealized dreams. "If the budgets get bigger, I'd like the animals to get even more exotic. I had this idea about some rhinos in a dance club -- that didn't pan out, so I'll keep my fingers crossed."