Documentarian John Wilson, known for his HBO show How To with John Wilson, is out with his first feature length documentary on what might seem like a rather dense subject: The History of Concrete.
Transcript
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Documentary filmmaker John Wilson built a cult following with his HBO show “How To With John Wilson.” Now he’s back with his first feature-length documentary. It’s in theaters now, and it’s called “The History Of Concrete.” And as NPR’s Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi reports, if that subject matter sounds a little dense, that is kind of the whole point.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI, BYLINE: At the open of John Wilson’s new film, we find the filmmaker listless and adrift after the end of his hit HBO show.
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JOHN WILSON: The space between projects is hard. Time becomes unstructured. You settle into some of your worst habits.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: He’s back to wandering the streets of New York for hours at a time in search of serendipitous moments to capture with his camera.
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WILSON: You have to do everything by yourself again. And rebuild your whole archive of street footage from the bottom – from the bottom up.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Luckily, for Wilson, he is able to find inspiration in moments that many of us might find hopelessly mundane. That’s how he managed to make 18 HBO episodes of strange, poetic video collage, packed with visual jokes and vulnerable interviews, all packaged as how-to tutorials, like how to split the check or how to clean your ears.
WILSON: To me, it’s almost, like, arbitrary what the subject matter is, you know? I’m kind of just looking for some kind of container to fit the world into.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: So when Wilson’s basement started to flood a couple years ago, and he discovered a crack in the concrete foundation of his home, instead of just calling a contractor…
WILSON: It made me want to read up on what concrete actually is, and that sent me down a very deep rabbit hole.
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WILSON: You got a couple of great books on the subject and got your new movie under way.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: But when Wilson started shopping around his documentary idea to potential financiers – a process of awkward Zoom meetings he weaves throughout the film – they did not seem to find the premise as funny or as fundable as he’d hoped. And so Wilson decided to forge ahead on his own.
WILSON: I like to prove to myself that I can make the most unfunny thing funny and go on some kind of weird journey as I’m trying to make that happen.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Wilson’s journey, in this case, takes him to some places you might expect, from the oldest concrete street in America to the Pantheon in Rome to the conference halls of Las Vegas.
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WILSON: Every June, the entire concrete industry reunites for a handful of different conventions to network and talk about new innovations in the industry.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: But in classic Wilsonian (ph) form, the film quickly expands into a meandering meditation on crumbling American infrastructure, the politics of affordable housing, and the world’s insatiable appetite for concrete. But don’t expect a Wikipedia article.
WILSON: The first version of the film usually feels more like a PBS version, and then I kind of strip away a lot of the actual useful information.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Sudeep Sharma, a documentary programmer at the Sundance Film Festival, says he first came across “The History Of Concrete” as one of the thousands of submissions they receive every year.
SUDEEP SHARMA: I think about it as, like, sifting for gold, you know? Like…
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: (Laughter).
SHARMA: And I was like, oh, John Wilson – like, is this the John Wilson?
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Sharma sees Wilson’s particular talent and the way he’s able to pull off this magic trick of taking something almost laughably plain and spinning it out into an entire world.
SHARMA: That’s what’s so funny about concrete, ’cause the concrete sounds like – it doesn’t have anything behind it. It’s just concrete. And he actually – like, no, there’s a whole culture and world and commerce around this that’s actually super interesting.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And while traditional funders may not have gotten that vision early on, “The History Of Concrete” did ultimately premiere to a sold-out crowd at Sundance and is now opening in theaters around the country. John Wilson says the lesson there is that you don’t need approval to go out and start making the thing in your head.
WILSON: And that’s the best revenge you can get against the industry sometimes…
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: (Laughter).
WILSON: …Is making the thing and making it the way you want it.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: It’s a reminder, Wilson says, to trust that all those nebulous ideas and eclectic interests will eventually coalesce into something a little more – uh – solid.
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, NPR News.
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