Director Ryan Andrej Lough (Mediterranea, IO) and his team, including producer Adam McKay, are looking to challenge audiences to rethink consumerism and hyper-capitalism with their new documentary You Need This, which gets its world premiere on Sunday at CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, which runs through March 30.
“Can we break the grip of the system before it is too late?” asks a page about the doc, narrated by Serra Naiman, on the Copenhagen festival website. “As you read this, millions of products are being bought and soon thrown away. We are filling our shopping carts, thinking less, and longing for more. Our basic needs have become cogs in a profit machine where we work and consume until we die. But who really controls the system and can we break free? You Need This explores how consumerism and hyper-capitalism shape our lives, society and planet.”
A synopsis strikes similar dark tones: “From mass marketing, advertising, and the manipulation of our dreams to the pursuit of material happiness, the 21st-century economic system is destroying our shared planet, creating enormous wealth among a small elite but leaving the rest of us with a huge bill.” There is though an optimistic conclusion: “But we still have time to rethink what we really need.”
Watch a trailer for You Need This here.
In his director’s statement about You Need This, Lough argues that we all need his film and others like it. “We, as a society, need to become aware of the power structures that manipulate us from birth to death, creating global division and destruction, using the whole of global society as tools, simply to make more money for a few individuals who care nothing for the planet and the health and wellbeing of any society,” he says.
It will come as no surprise then that the movie, Lough’s first feature as a director, makes for uncomfortable viewing as it looks to give new meaning to “shop ’till you drop.” “The film was meant to be challenging and really confront the issues,” Lough tells THR. “There have been a few films over the years covering similar topics, but many of them have become kind of forgettable. I really hope that this does stick with people. That’s all we can hope for. Because with the current attention spans and the over-saturation of media, it’s hard to predict if a film or a project, a book, a poem, or anything will have a lasting impact on people.”
The director emphasizes that he and his team worked hard to highlight in the doc that the concepts and behaviors they focus on may have a reputation as American phenomenons but are really global forces. “Consumer capitalism is a 20th-century American invention, a spin on capitalism,” Lough notes. “I’ve spent more than half of my adult living in Europe,” including Germany, Hungary, France and Italy, Lough notes. And he has traveled the world extensively, including the time he spent in Afghanistan, Kenya, Rwanda and Morocco. “I’ve also been in various other places, such as Japan, which is capitalism to the extreme. And so in putting this film together and doing the research with the team of researchers that we worked with, the challenge was always to approach it as the global issue that it is.”
As such, one area the film examines is how fashion items get produced abroad thanks to cheap labor before being shipped to the U.S. and around the world for our shopping pleasure — and then end up in a landfill in Latin America or Asia.
A key message the movie focuses on is how the result is dividing and hurting the planet. “Consumer capitalism has been co-opted by different governments and spun out of control to where it’s creating billionaires at the expense of the world and society,” Lough tells THR. “The challenge was to show this in a way that anyone watching it anywhere on Earth at any time could see it, make sense of it, and then begin to question these power structures, which are spreading throughout the world, wrecking it and leaving a trail of destruction.”
Lough originally thought about tackling the issues covered in You Need This in a four-part limited series “but getting the financing for that was a little tricky, so we made a film instead,” he says. “I think we did a really good job bringing all of this information together in an alarming and prescient manner to an 82-minute film while still keeping people’s attention.”
How did The Big Short and Don’t Look Up director McKay get involved in the project? “This is the first project we’ve done together,” Lough says. “I’ve known for a while that he’s been championing projects with these kinds of topics. He founded [climate content studio] Yellow Dot Studios, a nonprofit production company that is one of the production companies on the film. The focus for Yellow Dot is to really call out and bring down the power of big oil and other corporate entities that back the destruction of the climate, environment and resources throughout the world.”
Lough showed early versions of the film to friends, including actor John C. Reilly, to get some feedback. “He is also very good friends with Adam,” recalls the filmmaker. “And when I sent it to John, he thought that Adam’s participation in the film would be valuable, not only to help boost the profile of the film, but also really hone in on research and help align the creative and the research. So, John showed the film to Adam and introduced us, and Adam loved the film and loved the ethos, the messaging of it, and the purpose. So, he agreed to come on board. And Adam has been a massive help, creatively … and just being a great, supportive producer in a fairly challenging landscape out there.”
Lough is passionate in his belief that the world needs change, so his goal with You Need This is to allow viewers to “question things by presenting them with [insights] in a fact-based manner,” thanks to academics and other scholars. After all, Lough notes, “one of the principal purposes of art, whether it’s cinema, music, or literature is to question our reality and try to make sense of our reality, and then explore new ways of doing things in better ways. So, it’s not nihilistic or apathetic. It’s sensitive and empathetic.”
Lough is also sensitive to the risk of overwhelming audiences with too much weighty information and disturbing scenarios, so he serves up You Need This with a healthy dose of lightness and humor. One example is a scene early in the doc discussing basic human “needs,” only for a video montage to show off “desires” instead.
‘You Need This’
“There’s an old adage: disarm them with humor and then hit them with a gut punch in reality,” explains Lough. “So that was one pretty constructed approach we took because it is a lot of heavy information. If we just have a bombardment of heavy information without any disarming humor, or without taking a step back and looking at it with a laugh, it just becomes too heavy. So humor was a big part of it. That’s why we cast Serra Naiman, who’s a brilliant comedy writer and performer, [as narrator]. Also, Adam, being a comedy writer, giving feedback on the writing was great. It was always centered around humor, satire, and being able to have people laugh while digesting the heavy information.”
The film also explores advertising and propaganda and the psychology behind them. “It was not lost on me when we were writing the structure of this film and editing it that there is this power that advertisers and marketers utilize to suck us in to buy products through emotional manipulation,” Lough tells THR. “It is something I wanted to play with in this film as a mirror to the advertisement and propaganda industry that we’re calling out. And so some of the film utilizes structure and language that you would experience in commercials to get points across.”
The doc will also look to get its points across at its North American premiere that has been confirmed for DocLands in early May. Beyond that, You Need This is looking for a distributor in the U.S. and beyond, with ZDF Studios’ Off the Fence handling sales.
The issues the doc tackles are not typically seen this way in mainstream media, Lough acknowledges, which could be a possible benefit but also a possible hurdle. And he expects negative feedback from some people. “We really dig into the root of the issue, that consumer capitalism is a cancerous machine,” he says. “Some people will probably label me a communist. I’m not a communist — I’m a rational human being who wants to see our species stay alive. And this machine of capitalism is a massive issue. It has become the single most destructive force in human history, and no film has directly called that out. Many films allude to that, especially narrative films, but I guess we’re indicting it. It’s a scathing indictment.”
Given the current political situation in the U.S., Lough recognizes the reality that his film might be a risky proposition for distributors who likely don’t want to run afoul of the current administration.
“It is a very conflicted society in the United States,” Lough acknowledges. “We’re curious to see what comes of it. We’re in a very risk-averse industry right now — most streamers and distributors aren’t looking to take on films that are risky, including because of the current administration. They are more risk-averse than a few years ago. Some of that has to do with fear of political action, and some of that has to do with spend-versus-return ratios. I also think some of it has to do with not being bold enough to broadcast great films and non-fiction media.”
The director urges media and entertainment companies to give more challenging and riskier projects a shot though: “Everyone being pickier with taking on films that are risky is a shame because these kinds of films need to go out in the world more than a Marvel film. The world doesn’t need more Marvel films. The world doesn’t need more comic book films. The world needs more reality and entertainment within the realm of reality in order to keep us intelligent and not dumbed down.”
Read the full article here
