Struggling to find your identity as an artist is one of the most exciting aspects of being a young filmmaker. Sensibilities can change in an instant or progressively evolve, and in many ways the genesis of "The Mountain Crumbles" came as a reaction to the feeling that my previous film no longer accurately represented where my heart and head were. The two years that had passed since the last feature film I worked on felt like two decades in terms of how much I felt I had grown and evolved in that time, both personally and artistically.

Perhaps most informing of the film to come was experiencing the crumbling of certain relationships in my life. Close bonds that for some reason began to slowly erode for no obvious reason. To this day I don't really understand the causes behind it, I've just chalked it up to growing up and growing apart. This was not something that was conscious during the writing process, but as they say, hindsight is 20/20 vision and looking at everything that had been going on leading to the film's creation, it clearly made its mark.

I was also eager to make a film that took place in the Oregon mountains. It is unreal in its beauty there, and something I took for granted growing up in Portland. I also really liked the natural implications of being physically isolated from society for my characters. In the wilderness, big city problems are momentarily forgotten and the forest becomes an incubator for all the tiny interactions that push or pull the nature of a relationship.

The most important aspect of the film for me was the essence of total creative freedom I was adamant about instilling in my cast and crew. It was crucial for them to understand that I did not want them to come work on "my" film, but instead to help create something that could be "ours". I wanted them to take advantage of having no one outside of ourselves to answer to, and to understand that I could not care less about the way a film is "supposed" to be made. It was important for us to feel like any instinctual experiment or idea we wanted to try, we could. It was important for us to just have fun.

I made the cast and crew actually camp up on the mountain for two weeks to shoot the film. We worked diligently every day and returned to huddle by campfire at night. Partially to work around our non existent budget and limited resources, but mostly to follow a spirit of honesty and authenticity. Ultimately I think that the film benefits greatly from our full embrace of the do-it-yourself spirit, and the result is a piece of work that is finally true to my voice today.

- Matt Jay