Matthew Frost on social media pretence, celebrity and his way with women

As a sexy model struts down the street the voiceover kicks back in. “It’s a solid buzz, with the kids. Tonnes of clicks.” What sounds like a grating pitch from a tediously clichéd creative agency is actually Matthew Frost’s note-perfect satire on the kind of great-looking but ultimately vacuous content that gets churned out every day. The added level of irony is that Matthew is exactly the guy you call if you want something viral and his previous work has garnered “tonnes of clicks” by lampooning the most indulgent tropes of the very worlds for whom he’s making work. “I have no idea why they let me,” he laughs down the phone from New York. “It’s fun to deliver a film that is a little bit on the nose for them but I have never had anyone say anything. “There are so many worse things the PR teams have to worry about. It’s an interesting space to be in, it’s so new and there’s so much freedom you can really go out and do your thing. It’s been nice to collect them in a way and have a similar tone throughout.” “I was always into stories, always yapping away. Having a lot of siblings we all had that same sense of humour and it was more about that than technically being into the making of films at an early stage.” Matthew Frost Une fille comme les autres – the film referenced above that was made for French magazine Jalouse – is the first of this series that self-consciously explores the conventions of online branded content. Fashion Film with Lizzy Caplan followed, then three shorts for Vogue starring Cate Blanchett, Jessica Chastain and Kate Winslet, and last year came Aspirational for Vs. magazine. That film, starring Kirsten Dunst as the plaything of two cynical Instagram addicts, has been viewed 1.8 million times. Solid buzz indeed. Matthew Frost was born in London but after his parents divorced he grew up mainly in the south of France, interspersed with trips to the States to see his Dad – “That’s why my accent’s all over the place.” By his own admission he wasn’t the kind of child who was always going to end up making films. “In high school I was drawn to film but I was not at all one of those kids who would isolate themselves and make little stop-motion animations, or the head of the AV club that rolled in the VCR machine and plugged everything in. I was more into football, more of a jock into my 20s. “But I was always into stories, always yapping away. Having a lot of siblings we all had that same sense of humour and it was more about that than technically being into the making of films at an early stage.” His siblings were all girls; he had two older sisters and then two younger ones after his mum re-married. A few interviewers have made a connection between his female-centric upbringing and the fact he often makes films about powerful, confident women, but he says it’s not quite as simple as that – a lot of it is just the opportunities that have come his way. “It was great for trying to score babes as a young person because I had been exposed to things some of my other friends hadn’t been. But there are things I feel I understand, a comfort in certain characters and not shying away from female characters. It feels very natural to be drawn to women, and then trying to get into their heads.” Matthew moved to California to study film at Berkeley and he enjoyed the largely academic programme that was big on theory and light on actual filmmaking. “I think I needed that time to figure out what kind of films I was drawn to and what kind of films I wanted to do,” he explains. “Instead of just going in and doing stuff that is obviously referential, it was nice to just study.” After graduating he worked as a production assistant on Hollywood films like Donnie Darko where he started to pick up more practical skills. At the same time he started shooting his own shorts, from which he was commissioned to make music videos, first by Alan Braxe and Fred Falke and then for M83. Fashion Film, which he made for the Viva Vena brand in 2013, was a huge moment in his career for several reasons – it was wildly popular, it directly led to the Vogue commissions and it cemented some trademark Frost traits, such as his interest in people’s obsession with the way they come across, his unerring eye for satirising modern culture and his ability to, creatively speaking, make turkeys vote for Christmas. Lizzy Caplan moons around ticking every hipster cliché and dismantling those fashion films that look great but have literally nothing to say. “I try not to be too cynical – it’s too easy to be a hater – but I love to take the piss. What was good with Fashion Film is that people always felt it was someone that they knew, but it wasn’t them, like, ‘Oh that’s exactly what Suzie does,’ but it’s also what the person watching it does as well. “Who started that, is it the ad industry, the fashion industry, social media, who knows? But the facts are you’re on Instagram and you want your house to look curated in a way that makes you feel cool. “T