‘Buy Now!’ Doc Director on Exposing Consumer Waste: “It’s So Well Hidden From Us”

As the holiday season wraps up, consumers are coming out of a collective hangover after spending nearly two months scouring sales and scrolling Instagram ads in search of gifts.

So, now is as good a time as any to watch Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy, which landed on Netflix shortly ahead of Black Friday. The documentary dives into the world of consumption and how the policies and practices at companies like Amazon, Apple, Adidas, and other massive corporations contribute to global consumer waste.

From director Nic Stacey (The World According to Jeff Goldblum) and the Oscar-winning production outfit Grain Media, Buy Now! features interviews with former executives that break down how larger companies keep people buying stuff — and a lot of it.

Stacey talked to THR about his film, what he found to be the most shocking revelations, and the hope for consumers: “There are really small, practical things that do make a difference.”

How did you come to the subject of the doc?

My personal in was Black Friday in the U.K. For you guys in the U.S., it’s a huge thing. You’ve got Thanksgiving and there’s this built-in time to go out and buy stuff. But in the U.K., we don’t have any of that, but suddenly 15 years ago, here, it just suddenly appeared as a thing. It’s a completely arbitrary day, there’s none of that cultural context, and it grew in popularity until now it’s part of our cultural DNA. That is the thing that turned me on to the idea that these companies have a huge amount of power and the ability to infiltrate the culture. And it’s happened in other countries across Europe.

Consumer waste is such a massive subject, how did you find a way in that could be explored in a feature-length film?

My idea for it was to take you from the selling all the way through to the end result. You would see the allure of the advertising and then the consequences of that. My pitch to Netflix was to try and make something that was using the language of advertising — the colors and nostalgia used to sell us stuff — and to turn it back on itself and use it to critique the system. The contributors were a huge part of it. We wanted to find these really powerful, singular stories where people were at the highest possible levels in large companies and then after what they had seen came to the realization that this was causing issues.

How did you find your talking heads?

I worked with this amazing producer named Flora Bagenal, and we went out to a whole bunch of people. A lot of people didn’t want to go on camera. We had people who told us pretty shocking things but weren’t prepared to sit down and say that even anonymously, for fear of legal repercussions or a bunch of [other] reasons. We didn’t have the kind of killer interviews at the start of production. Maren Costa from Amazon — we found her maybe three weeks before we went out to shoot the interviews. At the end of that [interview], I called up the office and said, “This is going to be the center of the film. Everything’s going to hang around this. This will be the spine.”

During production what was a shocking realization for you as a consumer?

One thing that got me angry was the lifespan of things and the lack of repairability. It’s so unnecessary when you see phones that have their batteries glued in — or Apple changing the screws on the outside of their phone cases to be a proprietary screwdriver. Emotionally, the biggest thing for me was going to Ghana. Lots of used clothing from Europe and the US gets sent over there. They have these bales, and maybe 20 or 30 percent of the clothes that are in these bales are re-sellable, and the rest is fast fashion that is made of crappy plastic. They don’t really have any infrastructure to deal with it, so it just ends up going to rivers, and it all goes on the beach. You walk down the beach outside Accra, and it’s this rainbow surface, no sand, just clothes. When you look at it, you see labels that you’re familiar with and the brands that you’re familiar with. That moment was kind of like The Truman Show. It’s so well hidden from us; waste is completely masked in our society.

Audiences have really been drawn to the computer-generated images of waste piled around well-known landmarks like the Sydney Opera House. What was the thinking behind using these images as a device?

This is one of the big challenges in making the film. Unfortunately, we have seen those images or images like them, but you tune out to them. I definitely have. If you see pictures of a dump, you go, “That’s bad,” but you probably are not going to engage with it. That’s why we’ve used a bunch of CG. My idea was to bring it back to the places where we’re consuming this stuff, like on the streets of New York. We make two and a half million shoes every hour. What does that look like, if you put it in an alleyway in New York? However well you film an actual waste site, people will just switch off to it, unfortunately, because they’re desensitized to it.

Can you talk about the decision to use AI in the production, with the film’s narrated voice?

Weirdly, lots and lots of people thought that all of the visuals in the film were created by AI. There’s absolutely no generative AI in the film. Everything is made by this amazing team of artists in London. For the voice, I wrote the [dialogue] for the voice, but the voice is a text-to-speech generator. The reason why AI is in the film is that the film is the story of the rise of the Internet, and how that has impacted how much we buy — online shopping, influencers, and the technology of the past 20 or 30 years. But we’re on the cusp of this massive next gear, which is AI. Loads of people that we spoke to said the same thing, which is that artificial intelligence is just going to be really, really, really good at selling us stuff. We will buy a hell of a lot more because AI is able to take all of the data points about us on a minute-to-minute basis and use that to help persuade us to buy stuff. All of the money that’s funding AI is coming essentially from people wanting to find ways to use it to sell us more stuff. That’s going be the next 20 years of this story.

Have your buying habits been altered in working on this film?

I was massively conflicted the whole film. The reality is people like stuff. I like stuff. Why do we want objects? Why do we want things? For me, when I buy something, in a way, it’s other people’s creativity condensed into a physical object. I think people will always want that. It’s just human instinct to want trinkets or things that other people have made. A phone is millions of hours of super smart people’s work. My realization in making this is that it matters in how you make those things. But there are really small, practical things that do make a difference. During filming, we spent time with Kyle, who runs a repair café where people in the community bring in lawnmowers, beloved Christmas decorations, and other things that don’t work. Then people with electronic skills or people who can sew come and donate their time to get things fixed. That has a huge net positive effect environmentally and socially. That is a beacon of hope that, on a local level, we can solve some of these problems.  

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.