The Source: Johnny Hardstaff

Director/designer Johnny Hardstaff explains how kittens alleviate the pain of living inside an Edvard Munch painting and reveals why he’s inspired by the ‘next’ not the ‘now’, films as yet unmade and a photograph of a blue fish wedged between a woman’s thighs

What is the most creative advertising idea you’ve seen in the last few months?

It speaks volumes that I find this question so hard to answer. I long to be blown away by something but find myself very rarely envious of advertising work. I find it so motivational when I see work that I sorely wish I had made. I should be combusting with jealousy on a weekly basis. That said, I’ve greatly enjoyed Mother’s work of late, in particular their Encyclopedia Pictura IKEA spot which some people mistakenly perceive as brave when really all it is doing is its job; namely offering the viewer something distinctive, which is surely the only reason for those of us who make ads to get out of bed in the morning.

Wieden’s London do a great job of just about everything they turn their hand to, but there’s no one piece of work out there right now that is melting my face off, and the fact is, there should be. Every single piece of new advertising work is an opportunity to capture our imaginations. Far too few even try.

What website do you use most regularly?

BBC Weather. How English is that?! But anyone who road bikes in deep English countryside will tell you that it’s marginally less depressing to choose to ride in the pissing rain than it is getting caught out.

What’s your favourite website?

ASX (AmericanSuburbX.com). It’s the most brilliantly curated photography website with excellent artist interviews. It’s introduced me to all kinds of fascinating talents, not least Leigh Ledare. As Ledare has it, “One day I told my mom jokingly, ‘As long as you regard your life as fiction, in the very least you’ll have some interesting experiences.’ She replied. ‘Finally somebody who understands me’.” Theirs is a curiously playful relationship, but the thinking behind it I wholeheartedly agree with. Live your life as if it’s fiction, and see what happens. ASX regularly makes me think new things.

What product could you not live without?

My special edition RESET Leica Q compact camera. RESET represent me in the US, and very kindly gave me one of just a handful of their own Q series cameras this year. This little German camera is killer. Buy one and shoot your fictitious life the way it deserves to be shot.

What product hasn’t been invented yet that would make your life/job better?

Shitless kittens. Allow me to explain. It’s long been my opinion that the reason that advertising has regressed into an endless vista of kittens (there are kitten-based directors now – I think that says it all) is because modern society is traumatised. We are damaged goods. The pace of life has hurt us.

The fifty-year threat of nuclear annihilation and the endless cycles of war and terrorism has left us doing a fair impression of an Edvard Munch painting, and well, what the world needs now, as it curls up in the foetal position and sucks its thumb awaiting a violent end, is… kittens. So in my home life we succumbed, and got ourselves a kitten. On the face of it, it is indeed curiously comforting. Unlike the digital variant however, this one shits black death with apocalyptic vigour.

What show/exhibition has most inspired you recently?

Nobuyoshi Araki’s Love On The Left Eye at the Little Big Man Gallery in Los Angeles. Araki is working on a level now that defies explanation. He has become his own genre. The work is both complex and immediate. It’s both a quick read and speaks volumes if you want to try and decode it. I just admire his image making. A woman with a blue fish wedged between her thighs doesn’t sound too subtle, but the execution is exquisite. I’m waiting for Araki to do a man with ripe brie in his trousers.

What fictitious character do you most relate to?

I think we all carry our inner teenager onwards into adult life. Mine would be Salinger’s Holden Caulfield from The Catcher In The Rye. Holden’s bullshit metre only has one speed and that’s ‘relentless’. There’s nothing about western society he can’t deem ‘phoney’ and I’m inclined to agree with him.

Mac or PC?

I guess it’s Mac, but truthfully, I’m a complete slut when it comes to technology. Why do we let ourselves identify with one or the other, especially now that Apple has shed the rainbow hued right-on Californian feelgood we all bought into in the first place? Let’s just say that this brand allegiance is a particularly fragile thing. It’s by no means an unconditional love, and I may well have been sleeping with Samsung on the sly.

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

As you may have spotted, there is a theme emerging, and that is my general suspicion of all things modish and ‘now’. I’m not interested in ‘now’. Why? Because everyone is looking at ‘now’. How are you going to make great work if you’re thinking about ‘now’? I’m interested in ‘next’ and that’s hard to see at your local cinema because it hasn’t happened yet.

This aversion to what everyone else is doing isn’t a new thing, I was exactly the same when my brother tried to turn me on to Echo And The Bunnymen (my loss), when everyone at school was raving about E.T. and even when I was a student at the spiritual home of modish that is Saint Martins School of Art. So it is with some pride that I can tell you that I have this month finally watched E.T. and it’s ok, but maybe not worth the 30-year wait.

What’s your favourite magazine?

So, I have this problem where I walk into Claire De Rouen, the best art and photography bookshop in London, and get immediately seduced by the finish and stock and cover shots of just about any magazine that has been crafted with some degree of care and difference. I find myself buying everything. Having started my working life with an incredibly brief stint at i-D, I know the work involved and I’m prepared to like any magazine that can get itself onto Claire’s shelves. But my favourite magazine? That would be the video magazine I have yet to make.

What track/artist would you listen to for inspiration?

Thankfully I’m not at the stage where I have to look for inspiration. I’m not in need of creative Viagra just yet. But just to be purposefully wanky, I will admit to a private taste for Werner Herzog’s 1970s German electronica faves Popol Vuh. Listen He Who Ventures puts me in my own special creative pyramid, one where Native Americans administer peyote to me and point and laugh at the gibbering white man.

Who’s your favourite photographer?

This week it would have to be Chris von Wangenheim. But on this matter I am capricious to say the least.

If you could live in one city, where would it be?

Tokyo. I would live there tomorrow. I fell in love with the city years ago and just kept going back. I had to ban myself from visiting. It just seduces aesthetes. It’s graceful, exquisitely mannered, inherently thoughtful; a scented, folded, pressed, strange urban perfection. Some of my happiest moments have been spent simply savouring the sunlight through a limousine window on the way out to Narita, determined to enjoy every last moment prior to the return. All of that said, if I were female I would perhaps be choosing a different city.

Who’s your favourite designer?

Miuccia Prada. There’s a spellbinding sense of taste within the Prada collections, the communications and the retail interiors, and a wonderfully playful sense of humour behind everything that comes out of Miu Miu. Miuccia crafts the kind of spellbinding world-building that first drew me to advertising via Ridley Scott’s exquisite Share the Fantasy television work for Chanel. It’s an immersion that transcends fashion. It becomes a realm. Fantasy is the perfect word. Miuccia Prada crafts illusory worlds for us to psychologically populate.

If you could have been in any band, what band would you choose?

Roxy Music. As you can see, I’m on a majorly retro tip this month. What’s not to like? Bryan Ferry, an improbably working class lad, doing ‘smooth’ and ‘heightened’ in the most original way with the perpetually brilliant Brian Eno. 2HB and Re-Make/Re-Model’. Yes, it was before my time too, and that’s exactly the point. It’s not what’s ‘now’ that excites, ‘now’ has been done. It’s all about what happens when you make ‘next’, ‘then’ and ‘never’ collide.