Patrick Daughters

The music videos of Patrick Daughters reveal all the panache of a feature film maestro. But, says David Knight, until he makes that transition, advertisers are quite happy to use his skills on their ads.

Already one of the most gifted talents working in music videos in the US, Patrick Daughters has been on a major roll for 12 months, directing excellent work for hip American indie bands, such as The Shins, Bright Eyes, The Liars (featured in shots 103) and Interpol.

But for impact and success, one video towers over the others - Feist's 1,2,3,4. It is a tour de force: a dance routine, featuring the Canadian singer and a small army of dancers, captured in a single virtuoso camera move. Its technical brilliance perfectly complements a sweet song to create three minutes of dazzling, life-affirming entertainment. The Feist video immediately gained a cult following - home-made homages spread across YouTube - and it scooped Best International Video at the UK's CADS.

But Daughters admits that what happened next left him with mixed feelings. "When I made that video I didn't think I'd be selling iPods," he says. Daughters is referring to Apple's selection of the Feist video to appear on the screen of the new iPod Nano in their latest ads - an inspired choice, but the vagaries of music video rights meant that Daughters didn't receive a penny. To add insult to injury, another director took the credit for the ad.

Despite this grievance, the New York-based director is aware that the Apple exposure is ultimately worth its weight in gold. "It's great for Feist, and it's great for me," he confirms. "It certainly gets me noticed."

Cool, conceptual and cinematic, over the past four years Daughters' work in music videos has revealed a solid creative integrity. Lately, that sensibility has extended beyond promos, and this year he broke into commercials with a satirical anti-drugs PSA, plus two ads for Clarks with St Lukes in London. He has also just shot his first seriously 'big' campaign: a pair of ads for Microsoft's iPod rival, Zune, for San Francisco agency T.A.G. McCann.

When shots spoke to Daughters - who is represented by The Directors Bureau in Los Angeles, the company created by Roman and Sofia Coppola and Mike Mills - he was in self-imposed writing exile in rural California, completing the first draft screenplay of what will hopefully become his first feature. He is working with the producers of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, American Splendor and 21 Grams. An impressive line-up, but then Hollywood has had its eye on Daughters for a while now.

The 31-year-old director was born in Berkeley, California, where he enjoyed an unusual high school education which was strongly focused on art. "The arts programme was at a level where students could use their painting portfolios to get scholarships," he says. Already an accomplished painter as a teenager, Daughters won a scholarship to study in New York - and then chose film school over art school, a decision he initially regretted.

"I floundered about for a while and considered going back to painting. Part of the problem was that they didn't give you a film or video camera until the second year. I'd already enrolled in art school when I decided to give it another go." Luckily, working in a Manhattan video store enabled him to acquire a grounding in cinema that would put him on a par with fellow students "who'd seen everything". In fact, his time devouring the work of Kubrick, Hitchcock, Lynch, Kurosawa and Tarkovsky provided a vital spark for his own ambitions.

Daughters directed three award-winning short films at film school; In Life We Soar, Any Creature and Unloved. He's self-deprecating about them now - particularly the first one. "It's dark - unremittingly dark. I was going through a Francis Bacon period, and it was the kind of film that could ruin your day. By the time it got shown, 9/11 had happened and people just didn't need that." But he was doing something right: Unloved won Nintendo's Eternal Darkness Film contest in 2002 - and a $20,000 prize.

"I was fortunate that I met some of my best friends at film school," he says. They included Karen Orzolek - soon to become Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. At that point he had little idea of her musical ambitions. "I had a film showing at [Austin, Texas music festival] South By South West in 2001 and Karen drove down with me," he recalls. "She'd just done this demo with her band and played it in the car. I just thought: 'That's cool!' and didn't give it much more thought."

A year later the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were themselves playing South By South West, signing a big record deal and becoming a very hot ticket. Meanwhile, following the success of his short films, Daughters was invited to Hollywood and returned with an agent and a film deal. "I went to Paris to write a screenplay. But at the same time, Karen's successes happened very quickly, and she started talking about making videos."

Which is how Daughters came to make his first video, documenting the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' triumphant first tour of the UK in early 2003 with a Bolex camera, which became the promo for Date With The Night. It was several cuts above the usual 'access all areas' tour video, but if that was a promising start, the follow-up for Maps was an exceptional advance. Maps is an extraordinary performance video with a serious movie-like sense of drama: the band are playing in a hall to a few friends with such intensity that Karen is finally moved to tears.

Several top directors were keen to make it - including, rumour has it, Karen O's future boyfriend Spike Jonze - but Karen stuck by the inexperienced Daughters. "The record company was in disbelief, but Karen is a loyal person," he explains. "But I really didn't know anything about videos - I only knew what I'd learned in film school, such as how to move the camera. No one could predict that she'd give that kind of performance, but it was a pivotal moment in her career, and with her friends around her, all the emotion of the previous few months came out. We were just lucky enough to capture it." "The industry has gone to tatters. With the recent Interpol video we fought to get a decent budget - and this is a band that just played Madison Square Garden." Daughters continues to work with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and has made other similarly cinematic performance pieces, including a gripping video for Bright Eyes' Four Winds recently, where a redneck audience turns angrily on the band. He also likes to experiment with audio in his videos, such as mixing the track with the live sound of the dancers in Feist's 1,2,3,4.

He admits there is a temptation to repeat what is successful, but essentially Daughters' videos are measured to suit each artist, whether it is a modern day hoedown for Kings Of Leon's Kings Of The Road, black comedy for Albert Hammond Jr's 101 (where Hammond plays his own ghost), or the Lynchian horror for The Liars (in which Karen O makes a guest appearance). In his first collaboration with Feist, for Mushaboom, the singer flies from her Paris apartment to the street below for a number that is a definite forerunner of 1,2,3,4.

But now Daughters is conscious of the growing financial constraints currently affecting video productions. "It's just very difficult to make a living," he declares. "The industry has gone to tatters. With the recent Interpol video we fought to get a decent budget - and this is a band that just played Madison Square Garden."

So the just-completed Zune ads are a significant step into a new arena. Not surprisingly Daughters is unwilling to divulge much before they launch, but they promise to be serious flights of imagination - and music will surely play a major part. He says it was a very enjoyable and satisfying process. "The agency liked my ideas from the start, and we engaged creatively. The commercials have been very collaborative."

I ask Daughters if there are any limitations or constraints from advertising work, from agencies or clients. "It's more about an interest in the art of telling a story in 30 seconds," he says. "It's also about the opportunity of working with actors and succinct pieces of dialogue, with not every frame dominated by music." All of which will be useful learning curves for when he directs that first movie. Not that he's given up on music videos. After his conversation with shots, he was getting ready to talk to the lovely Feist again.