Valiant Pictures’ directing duo Brainwash TV, aka Ryan Vernava and Liam Karim Achaïbou, on some flawless filmic masterworks, the annoyance of not-enough-time, and why they’ve damned the future of humanity.

What website(s) do you use most regularly?

We’re using film a lot recently. As we both have backgrounds in creative research we use images to speak to each other. Sometimes we use paintings and other art, but we’re video junkies at heart. We have a huge archive of our own material but film is always expanding and there’s quite a lot of content there. Homogenisation is a real issue in advertising because it’s such a self-referential world, but we think that having quick access to a mix of film, music video and commercial stills can still yield highly original ideas. It’s something about the syntax between the images. For example, you might see a still from RoboCop right next to a meadow of flowers from Koyaanisqatsi and, suddenly, your mind goes to some magical third place.

What’s the most recent piece of tech that you’ve bought?

Most recent? We bought a sexy HDMI cable from BicCamera in Tokyo, as we left ours at home and needed to keep up with Succession while on the road…

What product could you not live without?

The wifi router? Honestly, it would probably be a TV. A nice big and smart one, too. Not sure we could cope without a steady stream of high-fidelity entertainment. That being said, could anyone live without a phone or a laptop these days?

What’s the best film you’ve seen over the last year?

We’ve been deep diving into some of the classics lately. We’re quite late (nearly 50 years) to both, but: Kurosawa’s Dreams stands out for its boldness and majesty and Altman’s The Player pulls off a masterful balancing act between slippery satire and slick Hollywood noir.

What film do you think everyone should have seen?

It’s a tie between My Cousin Vinny, Ghostbusters and Beetlejuice. They’re all flawless masterworks.

What’s your preferred social media platform?

Got to be Instagram, for simplicity and access to diverse imagery. It’s the best biggest gallery/exhibition ever conceived and we have it at our fingertips every morning; new, refreshed and ready to be self-curated. If you don’t enjoy Instagram you’re probably using it wrong. Ditch your friends’ pictures of breakfast and follow some of your favourite visual artists! There are probably a bunch of next-gen social platforms we’re too old to have heard about.

What’s your favourite TV show?

We love almost all TV, from the trashy to the sublime. With the right perspective, one can find joy and learning in almost anything, be it Sex and the City or Von Trier’s Kingdom Hospital. Our list of favourites is never-ending but recently it’s been Beef. It just felt so fresh. We loved the tone and structure, and the two leads were just fantastic. Also, shout out to Righteous Gemstones, which some people are still sleeping on. Danny McBride is juggling classic gangster tropes with religious pastiche and killing the comedy and thrills in equal measure. John Goodman is a titan. It’s fun stuff.

What’s your favourite podcast?

We’re going to sound like aliens now, but we don’t listen to podcasts. *awkward emoji*. We love films and TV shows, so that’s our go-to gap filler. When it’s not those, it’s books and articles. If it’s sonic, we’d be listing to music new and old. Podcasts for us are a little bit too much like listening to other people’s conversations; we’d much rather be in the conversation than listen to one. There seems to be a lot of diverse and interesting content out there but, as obsessives, it’s a huge can of worms to open and can seem very intimidating. Do you have any recommendations for us?

What show/exhibition has most inspired you recently?

We worked with Trevor Andrew aka GucciGhost [below] on a couple of huge exhibitions in Asia that we weren’t able to attend during Covid. It was great to visit his studio recently, which he opened up as an exhibition space. The venue is like the Disney Land of all things Trev. Every inch of wall and ceiling has been dressed with paintings and various memorabilia from past projects. It’s an intense and overwhelming experience but we love the maximalist, kitsch style. Having worked closely together over a number of years, seeing so many paintings new and old crammed next to each other is not only nostalgic, it’s inspiring to see the development of Trev as artist, the development of the themes and visual language. As creatives who also work a lot with existing cultural references, it’s great to see someone that started in the world of street art using pastiche and satire turning into a great painter creating work with personal gravity and depth.

NEW YORK, NY – SEPTEMBER 14: Musician Trouble Andrew AKA Guccighost attends the GucciGhost Global Launch Event on September 14, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for GUCCI)

If you could only listen to one music artist from now on, who would it be?

The Kinks? This is a horrible question. We wouldn’t want to turn any of our favourite noises into some kind of protracted water torture. Whoever it would be would have to be someone with a HUGE back catalog. Maybe someone along the lines of Quincy Jones or Nile Rogers, who also worked as music producers, so maybe we could cheat a little? Like, if we chose Dr. Dre, would we get Snoop Dogg, 2Pac and Mary J. Blige thrown in?

If there was one thing you could change about the advertising industry, what would it be?

Timing! Why does every project these days seem to be late before it’s even started? Some amazing ideas or execution approaches never see the light of day because of bad time management. You can always throw a lot of money at a problem, but that will never compare to proper planning

Pattern of alarm clocks on a blue background

Who or what has most influenced your career?

There was an art teacher in high school who had a little cupboard of VHS tapes and he would let you borrow one from time to time. There was all kinds of treasure in there. That was the first time seeing films like After Hours, Kids, Fear and Loathing, Clerks, etc. Also, shout out to Javed at Compton Video for letting eight-year-old Ryan spend hours flipping through tapes and reading the blurbs to fire up his young mind. Liam wants to thank his time at Blockbuster and those old director series DVDs where we first saw people like Gondry, Jonze, and Chris Cunningham tearing up the 90s.

Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know.

Well, if most people don’t know it we could say anything really, but as it’s shots, and we’ve bonded during the interview, we will proceed with honesty. Liam is a cyborg sent from the future to kill Ryan in order to prevent the destruction of the human race. However, after we met, we struck up an unlikely friendship and decided to damn the future of humanity in order to create amazing commercial content together for present-day clients. You’re welcome.

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