How This Unlikely HBO Star Made the Year’s Funniest Film

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/HBO/Magnolia Pictures John Wilson is one of the funniest people in America: a filmmaker who turns the mundane into something hysterical, insightful, and moving by using New York City, its inhabitants, and his own life as fodder for ruminations on topics both big and small.

Now, in the wake of his brilliant three-season HBO series How To with John Wilson , he takes his unique and uproarious non-fiction voice to theaters with The History of Concrete .

As its title implies, Wilson’s latest—which debuted at January’s Sundance Film Festival and premieres nationwide on Sept.

18—does not boast the most thrilling of subjects.

But that un-sexiness is part and parcel of the documentary’s eccentric hilarity.

Assuming his TV series’ basic form, The History of Concrete is, as promised, about the material that helps make the modern world.

It’s also about Wilson’s own post-television path, Hallmark holiday movies, tattoos, ATMs, local musicians, and the fundamental impermanence of everything—including the metropolis he loves.

A winding collage of on-the-street vignettes, character profiles, and B-roll jokes which he drolly narrates, it’s part autobiography, part urban portrait, and part philosophical treatise, all of it punctuated with shrewd juxtapositions, clever revelations, and juvenile non-sequiturs.

The History of Concrete solidifies Wilson’s status as a great chronicler of contemporary New York, not to mention himself and the human condition.

Unlike anything else in cinema, his maiden feature is that rare thing—a true original—and is even more electrifying for being so unpredictable, finding rewarding avenues of inquiry around every street corner.

Consequently, it was an honor to sit down with the idiosyncratic artist to discuss all things concrete, NYC, and the inimitable non-fiction comedy he continues to pioneer.

Walking to this interview in Manhattan, I passed a driveway where a random elderly New Yorker in a backpack was playing a discarded stand-up piano, and I thought—this is the perfect prologue for a John Wilson interview.

You could have your own TV show [ laughs ].

When you’re without your camera, do you ever fear missing unexpected sights like that? I do have a bit of anxiety around when I have my nice camera versus when I don’t.