John Wilson on The History of Concrete, Vulnerability, and Impermanence

John Wilson is interested in the mundane. He’s fascinated by the specificity of a neighborhood, a building, a sidewalk, a person. In his new documentary and feature directorial debut, The History of Concrete, a follow-up to the HBO series How To with John Wilson, he’s fascinated by concrete. And so he spends 100-ish minutes explaining the thousand-year journey of the material and its importance to modern life, especially in New York City.

As he’s prone to do, Wilson doesn’t take a straight line with this journey. He follows the people that interest him. He spends time at conferences, with restorative tattoo skin professionals, and busting gum on the sidewalk. Wilson ends up finding a central subject without a modicum of adjacency to concrete in Jack Macco, a trying-to-make-it musician who just won’t quit despite a lack of substantive success. Macco and Wilson drink liquor in motel rooms and talk about life, only for the film to cut immediately back into the world of concrete. 

A throughline of The History of Concrete is Wilson’s own difficulty in financing the film. He takes meetings with producers and famous people, filming recognizable faces for mere seconds to hopefully ignite interest in the project for both viewer and financier. Like all of his projects, the film is funny, informative, and thoughtful. It finds emotion through its subjects, the people that Wilson meets and continues to spend time with, regardless of their association with the original idea. He has a knack for asking people the right questions. It might be that he’s the only one to be asking them anything in the first place. But he makes concrete relatable, and that’s an achievement in itself. 

Ahead of Friday’s theatrical release from Magnolia Pictures, I chatted with Wilson about difficulty in vulnerability, NYC as a crumbling city, and the long process of making The History of Concrete.  

The Film Stage: How did you decide which threads to follow in the film? For example, you ended up spending 18 months with Jack. How did you decide to follow him when you’re meeting dozens and dozens of people over the course of filming?

John Wilson: I just like to have a bunch of balls in the air at once. In the absence of any structure, you need to invent a bunch of stuff yourself, and you just settle on a topic, and then you locate the people that will speak directly about the topic, and then you film with them. Then if they offer you something else about their life, then maybe you follow up with them. But then I also just like to have a bunch of X-factor people in the mix as well that don’t really relate to anything at all, at least superficially. I like to see how people will amplify certain metaphors. I try to give myself the safety of having things that have a predetermined structure, like a race or a competition of some kind. There’s going to be people competing in it. There’s going to be a finish line. You have these larger durational set pieces that help keep your thoughts in order and the narrative slightly cohesive throughout it. 

But then I met someone like Jack, who was just in a liquor store, and he looked like a musician, which thankfully he was. I just decided to keep spending time with him because he was really emotionally available. He was charismatic, and he was really optimistic in this way that I was having a struggle with. I was really down on myself and my ideas the whole time. But he never really faltered in the same way. He just kept performing. He filled in the space that I was having a hard time with, in terms of self-esteem. If he wasn’t a musician, then maybe that would have been the end of it. 

You ask a handful of people the same question, and then one of them is gonna give you an interesting answer, and then you just see how long the road lasts and you just follow it until something happens. It’s what I’ve done historically with a lot of people, at least in the show. Something happens to everybody, no matter who you are. So it’s just a matter of spending enough time to see what that thing is that happens, and then you see if it fits into what you’re making, or you augment what you’re making to fit what happened in real life. I think you should lead with what happens naturally, because that’s the hardest thing to fabricate—something that is too oddly shaped for you to have written or even imagined.

Do you feel like that’s what you did in this? Augmented part of the narrative to mold around Jack and his story?

Without spoiling anything, there are certain things that happened in the final act of the film with the musician that I did have material to support, but it wasn’t in the movie initially. You just shoot and shoot and shoot, and then the stuff that feels the most real and surprising and emotionally powerful, you get back into the edit. You almost try to build up to that in a way that you didn’t initially, because that’s now the most important part of what you’re making. It’s so hard to pick apart. It’s like every single piece of the film had a different origin story and they’re all just collaged together. And without the glue of the narration, it would feel ludicrous.

You mentioned feeling down on yourself during the film. It feels like one of the through lines is the financial burden and difficulty of raising money for this project. Does it change your project or your process when you’re thinking about commerciality? 

In the Hallmark class, she says that people don’t want to watch people struggling financially and that it should be a balm. So I wanted to invert that and lean into this thing that she told me not to do in a film, and just see how that would affect an audience’s relationship with the work. I both like to embrace but reject the Hallmark rules almost in equal parts throughout the edit. I ended up including a lot of the commercial frustration that I was having because it felt like that was like a good teaching moment. There are a lot of projects that I wish I knew what actually happened and how things were actually made. And the stuff that spoke to me the most throughout my life was stuff that gave you specific facts and figures, or showed you what it was actually like in these environments. I think people obscure it in certain ways because that’s not what their work is about a lot of the time.

With the project of How To, I did want it to be partially a genuine tutorial. I find that it’s cool to have the thing that you are resisting become the spine of your work sometimes, and I think that there’s just as much value in that, even if you are satirizing it. Because they’re right: having a celebrity in your work probably does help its marketability. That was funny, and I understand the power of this imagery—and I don’t want to deny it either—but it’s not essential for the thing to function. I also embraced the rockumentary stuff that they were trying to get me to do. I’ve always had a bit of a chip on my shoulder. Some films are revenge films, and I’m not saying that this was a full spite project, but that’s a fine motivation to do things sometimes, just to prove a point or to emotionally untangle yourself after you’ve been denied certain things.

How did you show that level of honesty and vulnerability during the film? How did you make that financial denial into a throughline? 

It was tough. It was very tough. I initially resisted it for a while, like the meta components of the film. I did just earnestly want to make the definitive movie about concrete, but I found that it would probably be more helpful to people—especially within this current moment, within the film industry—to see what it’s actually like. Even if I have to blur some of the faces in a Zoom call. I try not to have an ego about that stuff. It’s painful in the moment, but it’s ultimately disarming and funny to knock yourself down a few pegs and show vulnerability, because then I think the point of entry for the viewer feels a bit more relatable. Everyone’s dealt with rejection in certain ways, and this rejection in the film is just a stand-in for any rejection in a way, and you’re just trying to make lemonade I guess.

After watching the doc, I found myself walking around the city and seeing it crumbling in many ways. Has your relationship to the city changed over the last three years after making this, by watching it transform and watching it crumble? 

I take that section of the BQE less these days, but you forget pretty easily once you’re onto a new project. You work through it, and I know that the scope of this film was a lot larger. It’s almost like the prequel to How To. It’s dealing with the foundation that everything else is built on, and I’m thinking about a 1,000-year timeline here, which I think is weirdly ambitious for something so amateur. I’m constantly struggling with impermanence and things disappearing around me and things changing, and I think I just have a really hard time with change in general. It’s a bit of a way for me to calm myself as I walk around and see things falling apart, or not the same as they used to be, and that’s what a lot of the NIMBY politics were like in this film.

During that one property owners’ meeting, where the one guy is like, “There could be good change and there could be bad change.” It’s a vague idea, but I think that everyone is dealing with different kinds of change in their own way, and I wanted to put these NIMBY perspectives front and center, just to show emotionally what these people are going through, along with the absurdity of some of that mentality. I’m just trying to figure out a clever way to teach people to deal with that stuff emotionally, rather than being fully a hard no to any change.

The History of Concrete opens in theaters on Friday, September 18.