John Wilson made three seasons of HBO’s How To with John Wilson — walking around New York filming fire hydrants and public toilets, narrating in a halting, ingenuous register somewhere between Nathan Fielder and Frederick Wiseman — and then could not get anyone to fund his next project. The project was a feature-length documentary about concrete. He made it anyway. It is called The History of Concrete, and he still does not quite know how to pitch it.

Andrew Marantz interviewed him at Low Cinema, the roughly forty-seat micro-theatre Wilson co-owns in Ridgewood, Queens, where he was working the concession stand. The lobby has a John Waters vomit bag, a framed promotional flyswatter from Intercourse, Pennsylvania, and a French bootleg of The Odyssey on VHS.

  • Wilson starts with a title. There was exactly one book called The History of Concrete on Amazon — an empty box for storing valuables. “Not even the most determined thief would have the courage to open a book with a title that boring.”
  • He learned on his father’s Hi8 camera at twelve or thirteen and has not stopped. In high school a collective sold DVDs out of a car trunk; the principal blocked a screening of “Layup,” about a janitor who teaches a kid basketball before turning out to be a ghost, on the grounds that it glorified bullying.
  • On genre: “once you know all the rules, then you know how to break them and make things interesting again.”
  • On the Hallmark formula: he took a Writers Guild class on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie — you can’t have Jesus in your Christmas movie, you can’t interrupt a kiss with a phone call — and used the rules to ask whether cliché occurs naturally or is imposed by market forces. The Elements of Style bans it outright; he would rather lean in, then offset it “with the reality of our world.”
  • On method: he cuts the day’s footage into ten-second pieces and mixes them all “into the same soup,” then scrubs back and forth for whatever grabs him. He does as little research as possible before a shoot so he does not have to pretend to be learning.
  • At a concrete convention, everyone proudly told him concrete is the second most used substance on the planet. He treats holding an anti-concrete position, in 2026, as a useful absurdity.

The sharpest thread is impermanence. Most concrete is built to last about forty years, then dug up and relaid — which Wilson reads as an American commitment to planned obsolescence and planned renewal rather than building things that last, and as a way of reading film. He wanted the movie’s politics in there without a soapbox: affordable housing, climate, and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which he calls a third rail, because the moment you say you’ll fix it, it becomes your problem. A week after the interview, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a four-billion-dollar plan to repair its triple-cantilever section.

He also wanted to make “the most NIMBY movie ever made,” to give that argument a platform — while noting that “a lot of the YIMBY people are also strange bedfellows with the people within the construction industry.” In Wilson’s hands the mundane is not a small subject. It is where the argument actually lives.