John Wilson on ‘The History of Concrete’ and What’s Wrong With the Documentary Space: ‘People Are Retelling Stories That Have Already Happened’ - Variety

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John Wilson on ‘The History of Concrete’ and What’s Wrong With the Documentary Space: ‘People Are Retelling Stories That Have Already Happened’

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SPOILER ALERT: This story contains minor spoilers for " The History of Concrete," now in theaters.

John Wilson's new documentary "The History of Concrete" is, of course, about the history of concrete. But it's also about selling a documentary titled "The History of Concrete," which, it turns out, is almost as hard as concrete.

It sees the filmmaker, best known for his HBO series "How To," traveling across the world — to concrete conventions in Las Vegas and New Orleans, to ancient buildings in Italy and to graves in undisclosed locations. But he also documents the Zoom meetings in between, where he pitches the idea to Hollywood executives and tells them the film's title. Underneath their deep sighs, you can almost hear them mutter: Who wants to watch a movie called "The History of Concrete"?

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"I genuinely did want to make the definitive movie about concrete," Wilson says of the doc, now in theaters via Magnolia Pictures. "I ended up incorporating the meta aspects about a year or so into the process, because I felt like that was becoming a more interesting story. And I wanted to make something that another filmmaker could learn something from, about how things are produced, because that was always a mystery to me growing up."

Of course, it's not all slabs of rock. Wilson finds humanity in the cracks of "The History of Concrete," letting his camera guide him toward a professional "gum buster," a grieving local musician and dozens of other fascinating characters. It is perhaps the filmmaker's most substantial — and heart-forward — work to date.

It doesn't matter. In terms of the money, we were asking for what a Netflix documentary would cost. Our budget ask was also scaled to what "How To" would cost, so I didn't think we were being that outrageous. The struggle is actually a lot more real than what's on screen in the film. I just didn't want to weigh it down with more struggle.

People laugh when they hear the title, but you laugh knowing that the movie is done. It's a lot different when someone is asking you directly for money to make this thing that doesn't exist yet. Would you give your own money to make "The History of Concrete"? Even if it's me, I don't know. It's a strange proposition.

The documentary space has mutated slightly, and I think people value the wrong things a lot of the time. That's what I wanted to comment on, in a way.

People are focused on retelling stories that have already happened — whether it’s a triple homicide or a musician who has gone through all the motions of their career. Certain people with money have a hard time with imagination and this idea of art-making for the sake of it. You need to go through several layers of approval. I didn't realize how hard it was going to be.

It was freeing in that I was able to have more durational subjects — like the 3,100-mile race that takes place over the course of a few months. I don’t know if I would have been able to cover that as substantially in an episode of the show. Same with one of the main characters I spent a lot of time with near the end of the film. I spent a year and a half with him, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that without the elasticity of a feature film. But emotionally, it is a little different than the show, and while superficially it shares a lot of the same qualities, I set out to make something that was much broader in scope and almost felt like a prequel to the show, because it’s kind of the foundation on which the rest of the work was built.

Yeah, and Jack, the musician I spent a lot of time with, has the softest heart of all. In the world of hard surfaces, he's got a really soft interior.