How John Wilson Blended Concrete, Hallmark Movies, and Michael Imperioli Into One Film

Talking to John Wilson is, in some ways, a lot like watching his documentaries . In his somewhat nasal, Long Island-tinged voice, Wilson walks through the mundane, offering simple observations that also contain profound insight into the world around him. He starts on one topic, then takes a left turn — an “ exit ramp ,” as he’s called it — onto a different subject entirely, before winding back to his original point, but with some kind of comparison or deeper meaning at the ready.

He’ll say things like, “If you spend enough time with anyone, something’s going to happen. Something happens to everyone every day.” Or, “There’s a lot of examples of people needing structure and order imposed on their lives as a way to make sense of the chaos of endless possibility around them.” Or, “I think rejection and disappointment can be the greatest motivators of all sometimes.”

Of course, some things about an IRL chat with Wilson are different. In conversation, he doesn’t frame everything in the second person, talking things out in a hypothetical “you.” Also, when talking to him — over Zoom, at least, as I did — you can see his face, and the expressions that he makes, something he largely keeps out of his work. Lastly, his thoughts aren’t punctuated by clips of everyday life that he recorded himself, a practice he describes as almost a compulsion, in a way that both illustrates what he’s saying and often juxtaposes it with the ordinary madness of life.

Together, though, all those elements — the philosophical thoughts, the dry commentary, the contrasting clips, the everyman nature of his narration — are what have made Wilson’s documentary work so compelling, gaining him scores of fans, a hit HBO show, and a new movie, The History of Concrete , out Sept. 18 .

After starting with short films he made on a nothing budget in the early 2010s, Wilson launched How To With John Wilson in 2020, and it quickly took off, each episode ostensibly covering a tutorial of sorts before the exit ramps start piling up. “How to Recycle Your Batteries,” from Season Two, for example, starts with a search for a place in New York City that will accept used lithium batteries, before diverting to subjects like reincarnation, sanitation-worker safety, dangerous-toy recalls, the free section on Craigslist, the Christmas movie he made in high school, Nazi flags, smuggled taxidermy, radioactive waste sites, and sex-offender housing, before somehow returning full circle to batteries, all in less than 30 minutes. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

The History of Concrete , which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, plays like an extended episode of the show. But without guardrails of the 30-minute format, the “leapfrogging from one subject to another,” as Wilson puts it, takes on a new, more ambitious form. “I did genuinely pitch the movie as like a pretty standard documentary about concrete, with the caveat that it would take different twists and turns, like the work usually does,” he says. Still, he quickly ran into problems.