You Need This: Q+A With Ryan Andrej Lough

Ryan Andrej Lough is a writer and director whose background in advertising became the seed for his most provocative work yet. His latest film, You Need This, is produced by Academy Award winner Adam McKay via Yellow Dot Studios. We spoke with him about what he found inside the machine, and what he wants audiences to do about it.

Q: What drew you to make this film?

I was doing commercial work in Chicago to pay rent and tuition while in graduate school, but the more I learned about the advertising machine, the more sinister it felt. Here we were, giving so much creative heart to something people actively try to avoid, for no good reason other than to manipulate the way they think and act. Someone gave me Edward Bernays’ book Propaganda, and I was simultaneously disgusted and fascinated. That book sent me down a deep research rabbit hole that eventually became the film.

Q: The film challenges the idea that working more and consuming more equals success. What does success look like to you personally?

Time. The most valuable resource we have is our own time, and right now most people are spending the majority of their waking lives working to power a machine and then spending what they earn to keep that machine going. It’s a work-spend consumption cycle. Success to me means owning your time. Using it for your health, your family, your neighbors, your community. It means access to your own food. It means being able to keep doing the creative work that makes you feel fulfilled. I don’t care about being wealthy or having fancy things. When you strip away the noise, you realize that’s not actually what humans want either. That’s what the film tries to show: how we can take our time back.

Q: How does the current moment, with inflation, surveillance, and digital saturation, play into the film’s message?

It feels like the people controlling these systems have realized that consumer capitalism as we’ve known it is a failing structure, and they’re shifting focus toward something more alarming: attention dominance and mass surveillance. Every data point about you gets absorbed into algorithms and profiles. It’s consumer capitalism evolving into surveillance capitalism, and it strips people of any real ownership: over their time, their homes, their decisions, everything. The film came out right as this was accelerating, which made it feel even more urgent.

Q: You actually used advertising techniques throughout the film, including AI footage deployed as negative association. Tell us about that.

The film is structured using techniques pulled straight from Bernays’ Propaganda, turned against the system that invented them. The AI footage is a good example. We didn’t generate any AI. We pulled stock AI footage from the internet and placed it deliberately in sequences where the film is explicitly talking about unregulated technology harming society. When it screened internationally, some audiences were furious that we’d used AI at all — and to me, that’s a win. That anger is the negative association working exactly as intended. The film is designed to make you feel uneasy, even agitated. That discomfort is the point.