How To Make A Documentary, With John Wilson

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1:00Hey. Everyone in New York is going to die. But sometimes the city tries to stop that from happening. Many people worry about things that can kill them at eye level. But you're probably more likely to be destroyed by something above you. This is why the city has installed a sprawling network of temporary sidewalk shelters to protect pedestrians from falling objects. This is called scaffolding. And almost everywhere you look in Manhattan, you are guaranteed to see some form of it. It's as common as a fire hydrant or a honking horn. But most New Yorkers don't even seem to give it a second thought. So do you have strong thoughts about scaffolding? No, not at the moment. This is a clip from the hit HBO documentary series, How To With John Wilson. The New York Times dubbed this episode all about scaffolding as quote, the best half hour of comedy in 2020.

2:02I can't recommend the show enough if you haven't seen it. Wilson begins each episode with a sort of mundane premise like how to split a check with your friends or how to properly throw out batteries. And then he cleverly deviates from the idea, inserting delightful and strange interactions filmed on New York sidewalks and his poetic narration on city life and beyond. After wrapping three seasons of the show, Wilson has a new project, again focused on infrastructure, a feature length movie titled The History of Concrete, which comes to theaters this Friday, September 18th. I called him up to talk about the state of the documentary industry and the arduous journey behind making the film. John, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Why did you want to make a movie about Concrete? The foundation to my house was cracked and there was some water getting in. And while most people would just hire a contractor, I instead got a few books on the material itself

3:03and kind of wanted to understand it on a more molecular level. When you were doing that research and you were reading about Concrete, was there something that grabbed you and said like, there's a film here? You know, in the research I started doing initially, there were a lot of bits of trivia that kind of shocked me about Concrete and I didn't realize that there were critics of the material. It was something I never really considered interrogating before. I just thought it was a fact of life. I was kind of shocked to find out that Concrete, as we know it, has only been around for maybe a century, you know, throughout all of human history. I thought the Romans built things out of Concrete. They built a lot of stuff out of Concrete at the time, but then when the Roman Empire disintegrated, the formula was lost for a couple of thousand years. And no one used it in between then and like now basically. Maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. Does your basement still flood? Have you figured out how to stop that problem? Now that you know so much more about Concrete?

4:06My basement is still flooding. Despite this multi-year journey that I've been on, it still has a problem. Of course, your film is not just about Concrete. It's about public spaces, how they're built and maintained, who gets to decide what's made and what's preserved. The premise of the film reminded me a lot of the scaffolding episode of your HBO show, How To With John Wilson. Have you always been interested in infrastructure or is this a newer discovery? I think I've always been really interested in the way that cities are designed and the way that people use public space. And anytime that there's a large accumulation of anything in a city, it's interesting. And for the scaffolding episode, that was just one of those things where scaffolding is everywhere, but it's invisible. And I think that the scaffolding industry and the Concrete industry, that's the way they would like to have it. They would like you to not pay attention to this material and not really think about

5:09what kind of alternatives might exist. And there are serious harms when we don't pay attention to it. I'm thinking of the scene from your film about the Brooklyn Queen's Expressway, the big highway here. I didn't realize just how dangerous it is to be on that thing. Here's a former Department of Transportation Commissioner you spoke with in the film. I've seen pieces of Concrete weighing more than 600 pounds fall to the ground and crush a motorist below. So there is a real concern that you could have something catastrophic happen in this area over the next few years. That would not surprise me. Since you shot that interview, our mayor, Zora and Mamdani, has actually announced that the city intends to repair the small strip of the highway that the city owns. What are some other alarming facts about the degrading quality of Concrete today that you learned in the course of making this film? I learned that the recipe that we're currently using to make it

6:12is not really designed to last more than 40 or 50 years in an application like the BQE. I would encourage the mayor or anyone involved in redesigning the BQE to not just put us in the same place in 60 years from now. Because as it is right now, I really don't think we're going to be able to make Concrete for that much longer. I think that's one of the scariest things I discovered. Why is that Concrete requires a very specific kind of sand to mix with cement and aggregate. That sand needs to be a bit jagged. It can't be smoothed by the desert or parts of the ocean. Where we take sand from is from very specific places in Long Island or the surrounding areas. It ends up destroying shorelines and a bunch of other places inland all to be artificially replenished

7:17over and over again just so that we can continue this cycle of construction and renewal. I don't know. I mean, you can imagine how the pitches for this movie went just based off of how this sounds right now. No, it's fascinating. I do want to get to the part around making it and raising the funds to your point about the ecological harm and the resources required to use Concrete. You interviewed a researcher named Meta Ben Dixon who dropped this fact that was mind blowing for me. China used as much Concrete, which is a proxy for sand because sand goes into Concrete. They used as much Concrete between 2011 and 2014. So just three years as the entire US did over the last century. And that just shows that we need so much sand to the point where it's maybe even unfathomable. You told Helgate, a local publication here in New York, that this was your most political film

8:21yet. Yeah. When you deal with something like Concrete, I think much like scaffolding, it is political. And you do end up touching a lot of other parts of civic infrastructure just by analyzing the kind of base material. And I think most notably, it has to do with affordable housing in a certain way. Just because this is the foundation of a lot of what we build. And we end up using so much of it to create new affordable housing. And that's like a big push of the progressive agenda right now, which I think is a righteous thing to do. But at the same time, I think that there's a bit of a blind spot in terms of what we're actually building and how long it's lasting. And what our city is going to look like in 50 years versus the immediate knee-jerk reaction to just wanting more of something. There's a lot of NIMBY and YIMBY voices in this film. And I wanted to just lay out the arguments

9:27of both in their own words. But I also wanted to interrogate my own politics in the film by thinking about what I think is worth preserving. And maybe I'm a bit too precious about stuff and preserving parts of the city that need to be renewed or something. I want to return to the theme of preservation because it was one of my favorite parts of the film. But I want to pick up on an idea you've already introduced. The trouble you had convincing people to help fund this in the first place. Yeah. The film and its production began in an interesting place in your career. You had finished the third season of How-To. And on one hand, Hollywood saw you as a kind of celebrity. You were literally featured as a jeopardy clue in a category about celebrities, which you feature in the film. The celebs 1000. His HBO series teaches viewers how to do things.

10:28But the contestants didn't recognize you. You got a similar reception when you brought up your idea for the concrete documentary to a room of producers. Can you talk about your experience in those early pitch meetings? I think the movie, as it was pitched initially, was more of an ecological disaster documentary. I'm not surprised that I was given a tepid reception to something like that. But I tried to just remind the people that it's not really about this at the same time. That the film is going to get into much more existential themes about what this material means to us. I'm going to try to explore different arenas to see how we deal with this stuff as a species. I don't know. I'm still really bad at pitching this movie. It's not something that I've gotten much better at. Watching the film, it felt very real to me that

11:31you're feeling that you were making something that people didn't understand. That never seemed to fade. What did you see that you struggled to get these Hollywood people excited about? I think I was like a little attached to the level of comfort I had, like with a TV show. And I was trying to recreate that to a degree rather than just understanding that art making the process changes all the time. And you may be fully funded on one thing. And then I have to scrap everything together with another idea. And once I was able to realize that, I think it was very freeing because obviously a bunch of people in Hollywood might not see the value in the same way that you do. They're going off of the current contemporary kind of market taste. And if animations hot, then they want to see an animation. Or if a rockumenterie is hot right now,

12:32then that's what they want to see. They're following trends. And I think that trying to work against trends or work outside of trends is a really good place to start. I think you'll then guide the narrative in your own way rather than just getting lost in a sea of other stuff. It's funny you say that because in the film, you literally study maybe the most marketable kind of film, the hallmark movie. Oh yes. You got an email from the writer's guild offering a class on how to write and pitch a hallmark movie. And you went there filmed it and included some of that in your documentary. Let's talk about the formula and talk about what actually makes a hallmark round home, specifically a hallmark round come. The core of this brand is aspiration and I cannot stress that enough. Escapism. Hallmark movies are pretty settings even when they shouldn't be pretty settings. Love interests. These high key characters they be what to be and what to be with. And it's inspirational. Trauma is fine. In the dance on a high note if we will learn from the trauma.

13:35And that is because people come to these movies to escape their realities and a lot of those realities, especially in this audience, are financial. They don't really want to see people struggling financially of these movies. Hallmark movies are so formulaic they're predictable. They seem to be like the antithesis of your work. So how did the rules of the hallmark movie influence how you structured your film? I was struggling with having structure in my life. I don't know. I needed some kind of set of rules to start with. When I took the class, she set a lot of really interesting stuff and I thought it was so cool to be able to hear how these hallmark movies are actually written and how strict some of the rules are. And I kind of wanted to not make my own hallmark movie, but just to try to see what out in the real world actually reflected the kind of stuff that she was suggesting

14:36like to put into the hallmark movie. Like this idea of opposite subtracting and having a dead relative or something like that, to really make your story more relatable. I kind of wanted to just both embrace and kind of betray the hallmark rules in equal measure in my project. I think one of the first things she says is that hallmark audiences don't like to see people struggling financially, that these movies should be an escape from that. Most of my movie is just about me struggling financially to get it financed. So that's a big one that I wanted to invert to begin with. But when you watch it, you'll hopefully be able to see what I'm talking about. You interviewed an assistant director at hallmark who told you that it's the only cable network that continues to grow in viewership, whereas the rest of cable is kind of dying. I mean, what did you take away from that conversation about the kind of art that's economically viable

15:40to make today? You know, like all kind of value judgment aside with the hallmark formula, it is a fact that it is the only cable network that's growing right now. So if you look at that data, then what does it say about our viewing habits? Is it that we crave cyclical narratives and routine? Or is it that larger market forces are imposing this kind of cycle onto us? And I think that's what the movie is really trying to interrogate. I think both with the concrete industry and the hallmark channel and you know, I think just the entertainment industry at large. Documentaries are getting made, but they're kind of following formulas and sticking to subject matters that have proven successful for the streamers, especially like true crime or colt exposés or celebrity biopics. What kind of documentaries would you like to see more of?

16:45A lot of the documentaries getting made these days are about stories that have already happened. And I would like to see more documentaries made about something that's currently happening. The most exciting nonfiction stuff to me is the stuff that is able to pull off covering a story in real time. You talked about how important it is to tell stories as they're happening. And you attempt to do that in your film by following a musician who's not famous yet named Jack Macco. Do I have his name right? Yeah. You meet him while he's giving out samples in a liquor store. You ask him if he's in a band and you end up following him around. It's one of those chance encounters that ends up changing the course of the film. You have such a great eye for characters. How do you decide who you want to follow, who you want to devote your precious time and resources to? I don't know. It's a bit random. In the case of the gentleman I met in the liquor store,

17:45I genuinely was looking for a musician of any skill or success level. And he had long hair. So I asked him if he was... That kind of metal hair. He looked like a musician. So I asked him if he was one and he said, yeah. So at that moment, that was the only person I really had to present to any finances. So I just wanted to stick with him. But I think also I could tell that he had a really kind of soft heart and he was very open and conversation came really easy. There's like an interesting kind of mix you encounter of people that are performers sometimes or like exhibitionists of some sort that are also really down to earth and feel like you're seeing who they actually are. I felt that mix with him and I felt like he was good to hang out with because he was really optimistic and no matter what bad stuff happened to him, he always found some way to think of it

18:47positively, which I struggle with a lot. And I often look to people like that in my life that can think optimistically. That helps me get through tough times. Coming up after the break, the second half of my conversation with John Wilson. On the media is supported by Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort, offering destination focused small ship experiences on all seven continents, with a shore excursion included in every port and programs designed for cultural enrichment. And every Viking voyage is all inclusive with no children and no casinos. Learn more at Viking.com. Pelosi, whether you love her, one of the best speakers, the House of Representatives of Everhead, or Hater. That crazy Nancy, she is crazy. She's a force to be reckoned with. We're not letting

19:53anything stand in our way. From KQED, part of the NPR network, the speaker, how Nancy Pelosi, changed the face of power. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. This is the on the media midweek podcast I'm Mike Allonjur. We're in the middle of the interview I did this week with John Wilson about his new documentary, The History of Concrete. We were talking about the memorable characters that Wilson introduces us to in his movie, like the guy who runs a tattoo preservation business. He literally sells framed tattoos, skin and all after a loved one passes away. So my name is Kyle Sherwood. I am one of the founders of the company Save My Ink Forever that specializes in preserving your loved ones tattoos. That tattoo, it was on his left calf. It's his skin. If you look close, you can see like pores. It looks like it's like skin ripping open.

20:54You can see the inside and it's like bionic, terminator kind of thing. It's just nice because you get this literal piece of this person. It's just really an awesome gift. Do you see your work as an active preservation? Glad you asked. Yes. Yeah, I feel like I capture all this imagery that doesn't really have a home. I often just create these containers just to fit all of this stuff into just so it doesn't get lost or corrupted on a hard drive somewhere. With the tattoo preservation, I kind of wanted to question my own desire to preserve at any cost because I think sometimes it can be kind of freakish to some people and it is subjective what is worth preserving. I think just the idea of historical accuracy, whether it's a historically preserved neighborhood or a museum that freezes a celebrity in wax at a specific time in their career, I think all of that

22:01kind of is in dialogue with one another. I just think it's like a funny thing to pick apart, because I can get a little precious sometimes and sometimes I feel like my desire to preserve things is a bit too intense and I kind of wanted to dull that by showing kind of what the extremes are. Why freakish? What about your own behavior as a documentarian? Are you trying to interrogate? It's a bit of an odd habit from the outside. I don't know. It's just something I really like to do. I was talking with the street photographer Daniel Arnold recently. We were hanging out in Midtown just going around photographing different things. I was like, I don't know why we had this motivation to do this necessarily. He's like, you can call it a sickness. I thought that was a really funny way to think of it. I feel so strongly about capturing something unique and something that's disappearing. That it just doesn't feel weird to me. You say this in the movie. We spend more money recreating the

23:06stuff that we miss than actually trying to preserve what's currently disappearing. That bit of narration is delivered over footage that you recorded on the set of Marty Supreme, which is this big budget film set in 1950s, New York. What about current New York or city life in general? Do you think is disappearing? I think a lot of sidewalk and ground floor culture is disappearing. You look at Marty Supreme and I wasn't taking a dig at it really. I was more just using it as a way to show what a vibrant street looks like. We keep recreating this over and over again with the doose or whatever. It's like, why are we constantly recreating this idealized historical portrait of a city rather than just actually living in that world? I think too much street life has been eliminated from the city in terms of vendors and very basic window displays. Everything is

24:11like an advertisement. All the windows and so are advertisements for something else that isn't in New York. We're making money for somebody else, somewhere else. Ground level retail and street level things need to be for people. We need to lean into that and not let these, I don't know, I don't want to swear. It gets me very emotional to think about the way that the city is transforming to become just like one giant advertisement for something that is on the internet. Why does it make you so emotional? Because these people don't use these spaces. Cities should be for people and I think that we need to really prioritize pedestrians and the best way to keep a city interesting and functional is to let people use it how they want in a certain way. I totally hear what you're saying. Obviously the city has become unfathomably expensive. It's

25:11very hard to live here. More and more neighborhoods are starting to have this same-ness look, franchises, like Follini coffee or what's the other private equity one that's really popular? Blank Street. Blank Street. This beige millennial vibe has started to dilute what makes each neighborhood feel distinct or special or- Yeah, these are the people that are interested in kind of endless growth for the sake of it and that's like a fatal mistake that will end up transforming a city in a really bad way. You have wonder, right? They have all of these street teams of people going out, handing out free meals for wonder and this is the ghost- This is the ghost kitchen company? Yeah, this is the ghost kitchen. It's like an urgent care for food. It just takes these soulful cuisines from surrounding neighborhoods and it tries to aggregate them all into one microwave kitchen. There's no human face to it. I find stuff like that to be so

26:14vile. It's not what I look for in a city. I think a place should have a personality and I think that the more diverse businesses, the better. I mean, there's this amazing thing that happens in London. They have this thing called the high street rental auctions where if a storefront is unoccupied for like six months or something, then it goes up for auction to the highest bidder to occupy it and start whatever small business they want. I think that that's genius. Something like that de-incentivizes people from sitting on a storefront for long enough to wait for something garbage like Wonder to show up. This film is very much in the style of your popular HBO series, How To With John Wilson. How did you land on the documentary essay as the genre that works for you? What do you like about that form? I read mostly nonfiction. I read a lot of stuff like books about concrete or you know journalism or literary nonfiction. So that came kind of naturally as I

27:20started to write the stuff just because I'm trying to use this narration both as like an informational tool but also as this kind of binding agent to piece all these other larger ideas together. And I think that the memoir helps me to organize my thoughts and and make it so it's not just like a one-way mirror. And I am actually reflecting and looking back at myself as I talk to these people about all this stuff and I think it kind of helps to dull any judgment you might feel I think as a viewer towards anyone in the work. I'm using the second person so it's like yeah when I say you I'm talking about me but I'm also talking about you the viewer and if I'm talking about you the viewer then I'm basically asking you to relate with what is happening on screen and I think the kind of the distance between the viewer's actual life and what I'm telling them their life is I think

28:20this where a lot of comedy comes from. Yeah. I was just about to bring up your second person narration which I just find so brilliant because as you say you're imparting your experience but you're also sort of describing what happens in my life you're inviting me to meet you as the artist. How did you come up with that convention? I mean how to you know I started making those videos in like 2010 or 2011 and I was genuinely just inspired by actual YouTube tutorials to begin with like how to fix a rocking chair or something like that you know like the way that they speak in those films they do speak in the second person in that way they're like okay so what you're gonna do is XYZ you know you're gonna take some glue you're gonna put these two together I just thought it would be really funny to start to suggest things that you you really shouldn't do or you would never you would never do you know within the mix of all the stuff that is like a genuine

29:23tutorial that was kind of how it started. Were you surprised by how successful the show was? Yeah I was very surprised that people like the show as much as they did I guess I was terrified when I was making the first season you know because COVID had just happened in the middle of production I was gonna come out with it while people were still very freshly into the pandemic and I thought people were gonna think it was kind of crass that I was flaunting this pandemic free New York around and I was worried that people would think it was strange to come out with something kind of funny and light-hearted during this like really screwed up summer. But maybe that helps explain why it resonated so deeply. Yeah I think people needed a bit of an oasis in that way they needed to be reminded of proximity and all this stuff because it seemed to just wash away so quickly. In your documentary you visit a concrete industry convention where you meet some of the people

30:23and businesses behind the cheap reproducible structures that surround our cities which I took as a metaphor for the kind of cultural products that dominate our media today. It seems like the people who are making those structures and making those hallmarked movies think that we all just want the slop. Yeah. Do you think audiences want something more? Do you think they can identify art that's coming from a real place versus just a quick cash grab? I think that the solution here is in like the patterns of gum deposits all around the city. I studied where the biggest deposits are concentrated. Just outside subways? Yeah but also like I'm thinking of the McDonald's drive-through you know the driver will spit out their gum when they're ordering food but then the passenger will wait until the last possible second to spit out their gum until a new flavor is handed to them. I think there is something

31:24there where it's like sometimes we will just mindlessly hold on to an old flavor until we are just given something new and then we just have that new thing. I think that sometimes we do get into these routines of accepting these kind of media patterns and this idea of just like everything being cheap and throwing it out rather than trying to repair it. I think that handing people something new that is better is sometimes what they need whether it's like better architecture or just like a film that's like a bit more kind of thoughtful or unique or like unconventional. You told our producer Molly though that you had something of a crisis making the film because you you were worried that the people you were pitching the film to didn't see it that way. Didn't see what. They were so worried about the viewer. Who the viewer is? What the viewer would think? Yeah, I think that like agents and producers and financiers are concerned with audiences and and viewers and and whether or not it will be marketable to the most amount of people.

32:30But I just started to think like what is a viewer? Like why do I want viewers? Is like a viewer a dollar amount or is a viewer someone who's mind you're changing or whose day you're improving? I realized that like just this idea of just wanting viewers started to kind of fall away from me and I had to kind of remind myself continuously throughout this project that this is like a solo pursuit and you know I have my good collaborator friends helping me out but the thing that should be driving this is something personal and you know the viewers will come as a result if it's good you know and if it's not then whatever. You said in the film over the course of making it that you were a quote that stubbornly pursuing this project has permanently disfigured your professional and personal life. That's really strong language. Yeah yeah it was a lot more

33:35difficult to make this film than I let on in the actual film. I really did not want to weigh it down too much but it was really really hard emotionally to continue doing this despite all of the denial surrounding it. I think I was a little short tempered with my good friends who were just trying to help me out sometimes and I think I was also afraid that this was you know as the first project out of the gate since the show that no one was picking up I thought that you know there goes the second album like I missed my shot and now I'm untouchable or something like that I don't know all of these like crazy I get into these like spirals of self-doubt that I often need the work to dig me out of in a way. I've never made anything close to the scale that you have but I can completely relate to what you're saying. Now that you have made the film and it's about to premiere do you feel

34:35like you're ready to like trust your instincts again? Yeah I think I think I have a better grasp on like why I'm doing what I'm doing and I think how to get people to pay attention to it. You know I had to go through the motions of picking a really unsexy idea and then finding different ways to humor the industry within that idea in order to I think get it to a point where I think it's satisfied like both me completely but it does reflect some of what the industry rewards and I think that's funny and I think there's any shame in that I think it's cool to play around with pop culture tropes and includes celebrities and make a documentary. I think all of those things are cool but it's just been done the wrong way for a while and I kind of more just wanted to include that stuff to comment on how I hope it progresses. Just one more question I don't want to

35:36take up more of your time. Since you're so good at giving advice could we end this with a like a little how-to on how to chase your dreams even when the world tells you that you know it's not a good idea. Yeah how to chase your dreams first thing you're going to do is just put the instrument in your hands and then whatever you make with it will be your next project and don't put that instrument down until you have something and you're done with it. John Wilson is a documentary filmmaker his new feature length film The History of Concrete will be out in theaters on Friday September 18th. John thank you very much no problem. Thanks for listening to the podcast extra don't forget to tune into the big show this weekend but in the meantime you should consider following us on Instagram and TikTok we also have a subreddit just search on the media I'm Mike

36:38Alan Ture