His HBO Show Was a One-of-a-Kind Cult Sensation. Now He’s Back With His First Movie.

Movies How to Make a Movie Like John Wilson The man behind the cult HBO docuseries on the tricks he used to make his debut feature, and why he’s the “shadow mayor.” By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Sam Adams? Sept 19, 202610:00 AM Magnolia Pictures Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. For fans of the slippery, absurdist docuseries How to With John Wilson, the prospect of a feature-length installment is excitement enough. But while Wilson’s halting narration and sidewalk-level perspective are instantly recognizable, his debut feature, A History of Concrete, is more than just a supersized episode. It starts with Wilson struggling to find work after the end of his HBO series, pitching the idea for a movie about the world’s second-most-used substance to skeptical executives while the billboards for his show still hang in Times Square. Then, he has a brainstorm: What if it were a Hallmark movie? A Writers Guild seminar on how to write a Hallmark holiday movie—sample text: ’Twas the Date Before Christmas—leads him to the studio where many of them are shot, where he laconically absorbs pointers on how to replicate the tried-and-true formula. But then, in typical Wilson fashion, the movie starts to wander: One moment he’s investigating ancient Roman techniques for mixing concrete; the next he’s talking to a man who specialized in blasting the gum off New York sidewalks, or popping onto the set of Marty Supreme. (This may be the only low-budget documentary to feature cameos by Timothée Chalamet and Jacob Elordi.) Wilson has a fantastic eye for the eccentricities of big-city folk, the everyday weirdness that goes unnoticed as people hustle by with their eyes on their phones. But he’s also got thoughts about affordable housing and artificial intelligence, about the sustainability of art and urban community in a world that seems increasingly hostile to both. Watching A History of Concrete is like walking down the street with a friend who’s interested in everyone and everything, and can’t stop talking about either. He’s fascinated with the chaotic density of cities—the way a stray gesture or odd bit of brickwork can be a gateway into a story real or imagined—and the things that both figuratively and literally hold those cities together. (For John Wilson, every week is infrastructure week.) His fluid, intuitive editing plunges us into a way of seeing the world that’s both new and utterly familiar, the way you might move through a city on a day when you remember to slow down and appreciate just what a rich and strange place it is. With a neatly mortared wall behind him, Wilson sat down with Slate to talk about starting from scratch, being an accidental landlord, and his surprising relationship with Zohran Mamdani. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Sam Adams: When you were making How To, you would send camera crews out around New York City with lists of shots you were interested in capturing. But with A History of Concrete, you were largely on your own. Are you always shooting with future projects in mind, or are you just collecting images you like and hoping you’ll find a place for them eventually? John Wilson: I never think about what context the material will ever be used in. It’s more just like, this beautiful thing in front of me is disappearing, I need to capture it before it does. You harvest enough stuff like that, and then you accidentally make a feature sometimes. I took a lot of care, even during the show, for it to feel unified, and I still shot as much myself as I humanly could, because no matter how much you instruct someone, it is still kind of hard to fully take every influence you’ve ever had and input it into another videographer. But I definitely was back to basics with this one. I shot 99 percent of it by myself. My friend Nelly, she had a few days where she went to go film different patterns of gum on the street and one or two other things. I was in such a bad mood when I started this project, because I had to rebuild this entire archive again from the ground floor. But I was just like, all right, well, the only thing I can do is just start. I would just go out and get some funny stuff, and then it’s like, Oh, I don’t want to ever lose this piece of footage, so now I need to build a movie around it. When you say you had to rebuild your entire archive, is that because HBO owns anything you shot during How To, or is that something you do every time? HBO owns the old footage. But it’s also something I do for each project. I mean, even in, let’s say, Season 2 of How To, I didn’t want to rely on my old stuff. I still wanted to try to build 100 percent new archive, because the old material, although some of it’s great, it does start to feel very stale to me. I’m constantly outrunning my own boredom with my own ideas and images, so much so that I often lose sight of the actual original title, in a way. What makes a found image interesting to you? There’s a few different things. I think an interesting image is something that feels like it’s grounded in reality, but also unexplainable in a certain way and also vague enough that you could project whatever kind of meaning you want onto it. Signage is obviously a fun thing to play with, because you can build an entire sentence out of words in public. I’ve worked as an editor professionally for most of my life, before the show, and I just wanted to do what I was never allowed to do in the work I was doing commercially. There’s a moment late in the movie where you ask a character, “Do you think it’s the best thing to have trauma lead to a positive arc?” Which is a deliberate callback to the early scene where you’re learning how to write a Hallmark movie, so at that point in the process, you have enough of a sense of what the whole film is going to look like to be making connections as you’re shooting. At what point in the process does the overall structure start to coalesce for you? The actual chronology in which I film a lot of this stuff would surprise you. I will usually talk about six or so different things with somebody during an interview, and I’ll hit each beat and then you’ll only see the one part sometimes. When you reduce it to just the parts that support the narrative, it almost feels like a conspiracy theory. But it’s through a lot of careful crafting. It’s kind of mind-blowing when you make an offhand reference to DMX’s Christmas album early on, and then much later one of the characters turns out to have a direct connection to DMX. But you must have come across those things in the opposite order, and put in the early mention so it seems like a staggering coincidence when the two connect. That’s the No. 1 thing that audiences have noticed over the rollout so far: “So do you know about DMX? Did you include the DMX part before you heard from the guy?” And, of course, the answer is no. I fit it in afterwards. But in the moment in that hotel scene when he reveals about the DMX stuff, I hope you’re not making that connection quite yet and that you are having a genuine kind of reaction to, like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that this …” I’ll admit you totally got me in the moment. It’s like a magic trick. I was watching the DMX doc for research before that reveal, so it was just a matter of putting it in the movie. But there was kind of crazy synchronicity. The History of Concrete wasn’t easy to get made, which we know because you include several Zoom calls with the people you’re pitching it to, and it goes over like a lead balloon. You blur some of their faces, but these are presumably people with substantial power in the industry. Did they know they were being recorded? And has there been any fallout from including them in the movie? No. No. They were not aware, and that’s why we had to censor a lot of the footage. I tend not to think about the legal repercussions of whatever I’m doing when I’m in the middle of it. I’m more interested in capturing something unique. And we did get permission from my agent and the other people at UTA to put their images from the Zoom in there. But I don’t know. I understand that there’s some kind of breach there, but I also am just like, “What are you really worried about? All you’re doing is shooting down my idea.” If anything, this just makes me look pitiful. I do have a line somewhere in there that I don’t like to cross, but I think that riding on the razor’s edge of what’s OK and what’s not is where all of the best art and comedy lie. This word gets overused when it comes to comedy, but it does feel genuinely dangerous. I felt like I might get in trouble just for watching it. Right, exactly. I did not think that it was going to be controversial. It didn’t even occur to me that you can’t record someone on a Zoom. It didn’t occur to me that that was something you need to ask about. I have this kind of street-photographer mindset where I’m just like, I’m going to capture whatever I want. I don’t really care. You manage the transitions between sections with such intuitive grace that it’s easy for audiences to go along for the ride, but sometimes I like to pause and try to remember the chain of events that led us to a certain place—like, we just went from the studio where Hallmark movies are shot to a race where people run around the same block in Queens 5,000 times. How did that happen? Do you like putting audiences in that position? Yeah. I think it helps with the replay value when you go and try to figure out how you got from one place to another. But also, I had a cab driver at Sundance who ended up staying to watch the movie after I got out of the cab, and he really loved it. He was like, “It’s great, man. It’s like being on a lazy river. It doesn’t matter. You’re just going from one thing to the next.” I like that. I try not to make it so discordant that it makes absolutely no sense to you, but I spend a lot of time with the voiceover in transitional moments, trying to make sure that even if it’s a flimsy logic, my thought process is represented somewhere to help ease the shock of a new environment. You stick out like a sore thumb in the Hallmark seminar to begin with, but if you know your previous work, it’s especially funny to see you in a seminar about how to structure a corny three-act romance. Did you learn anything from studying how those movies are made, either directly or in reaction against them? Yeah. I learned that you make a lot of money if one of your scripts gets picked up by Hallmark. I understand why people do it as a career. I mean, I was shocked by a lot of it. I didn’t realize that you can’t mention Jesus or Christianity in any Hallmark movie. My favorite part was that you’re not allowed to interrupt a kiss with a phone call. Just basic stuff like that, where it’s like, what if you did? So that’s why I spent most of the movie embracing and betraying or subverting these Hallmark rules, in equal parts. Yeah. You did an episode of How To focused on New York’s scaffolding problem, and Zohran Momdani got you to make a video announcing his plan to deal with the problem. And now he’s dealing with the deterioration of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which is something The History of Concrete deals with; it even looks like he used the same angle of the triple cantilever section in his announcement. So my question is: Which of your priorities would you like to foist on his administration next? Exactly, I’m the shadow mayor. I really congratulate him for making this part of his agenda. I think it’s so cool. And especially the BQE: Nobody’s wanted to put their finger on that for decades, because once you do, it’s your responsibility. I don’t know what the real solution is there. It seems that’s a real twisted knot of NIMBY politics, and kind of freight politics, and the concrete industry has its thumb in there. Not to mention the Robert Moses of it all. Yeah, that whole legacy. I think it would be kind of funny if he decided to close it for repairs and then just never reopened it, just to see how the traffic redirects itself. We’ll see. Maybe they should treat the BQE like a slumlord and accidentally burn it down. “Oh no, now we have to put in a park or a new rec center.” I know, but it’s cool. Any kind of change resulting from such a silly project, at least on its surface, it makes me feel afraid that I’m going to make a movie about the wrong thing and then someone will get the wrong idea about something. I mean, it’s funny with the scaffolding. I made the scaffolding thing because I wanted less scaffolding around in a certain way, but now after this concrete movie, it’s just like, Oh no, everything’s falling apart. You need to be very careful what you make a movie about next. Well, I have a big idea about, I think, how to fix both of those problems, but we’ll see. I have my own Robert Moses vision for the city, but I am not going to debut it right now. There are so many threads in the movie it took a second viewing for me to pull them all together, but one of the most prominent ones is about how to survive as an artist—how to make something that lasts. You deal with your own efforts to make a new movie, but also with getting offers to make adult-diaper commercials, and your unexpected career as a landlord, including the precise (and very reasonable) rent you charge your tenants. It’s something I often wish more artists were open about, but there’s a real stigma around admitting you do something else to pay your bills. It doesn’t make any sense. I can’t believe that this isn’t a 101 introductory class in every single cinema undergrad program, because the stuff that I learned the most from growing up and throughout my whole life has just been the stuff that is really honest about how art is made, with specific facts and figures. That was one thing that I took from Susan Orlean when we were in the writer’s room together [for the second season of How To]. We were writing the episode about when I bought the building, how to invest in real estate. I was like, “I don’t know if I should put the price of the building. It makes me feel a bit exposed in certain ways.” And she was like, “You absolutely have to put the price of the building in there.” That’s one of the most important parts of this entire story. I don’t know if you’ve read her memoir that just came out, but it’s unbelievable. She really gets into the black box of the writing process and how she generates ideas, what she does in between, every hiccup she has, stuff that’s really plainly worded. That, I think, is the stuff that you need to hear, because people obscure certain parts of their lifestyle or artmaking process in a way that serves no one sometimes. I want to offer the same to anyone who’s struggling. The Hallmark instructor says that people who watch Hallmark movies don’t want to see people struggling financially, but I want to invert that. You can make art without making money from it—even without asking people for it. I really don’t care about the money in that way, with the work. It’s nice that it has come as a result of it, but it’s never been the thing that drives me. You can just draw a continuous line from when I started making this work until now, and that’s because I am just making it to make it. If the market or the industry finds value in that, cool. But if not, it’s going to be happening regardless. The History of Concrete isn’t as specifically focused on New York City as How To was: You don’t say “Hey, New York” even once, and you move around quite a bit. But when you travel to Los Angeles, you remark on the city’s “pornographic” relationship to concrete, and how hostile the city is to pedestrians, which is really the point of view your work emanates from. Could you make something that wasn’t set in a city? Or in New York specifically? I’ve always liked New York as the beginning of each new journey. I just feel comfortable here. I feel like I know the rules. I know when to cross the street. I know what’s going to piss someone off, usually. I tried doing it in Rome this time around and it was really tough. I don’t speak Italian. And they apparently don’t know anything about concrete. Not as much as you’d think they would. I do travel a lot within the work, and I usually spend the third act somewhere else. This time it was Long Island, and I have a great fondness for Long Island. I grew up there and I feel like a lot of Long Island is underrepresented, especially in documentary. I had a lot of fun just showing people what I knew there, like different monuments or whatever. I filmed this whole 20th reunion of mine that didn’t make into the movie. But I can get bored in any city and make something. Is being bored a part of your process? Yeah. When you’re bored, then it’s like, what am I going to do? And then you just start filming stuff. That feels like a good note to end on. Everyone get bored and make something. Yes. Come see the concrete movie. Get bored. Comedy HBO Movies Documentaries