How John Wilson’s ‘The History of Concrete’ Became A Reflection of Life as a Documentary Filmmaker

“The History of Concrete” is a documentary that, at first, seems to be exactly what it says on the tin. A documentary about a building material. But when the film is made by John Wilson, you know there’s clearly more to it.

Over the course of his three-season HBO series “How To With John Wilson,” the filmmaker would take the premise of creating a tutorial about a certain subject, only for his interviews and research to meander into realms that are equal parts absurd and philosophical. Take one episode where his attempts to find a suitable furniture cover to keep his cat from tearing up his house leads to him looking into covers of all kinds — including foreskin — and contemplating how we search for such covers to find some semblance of control in our lives.

In “The History of Concrete,” Wilson explores how hard it is just to get a documentary funded about the making of concrete, especially when the budget balloons with trips around the world.

“I think I initially resisted the more meta elements of it. I really just kind of wanted to do a straight Ken Burns-y documentary about concrete at first,” he told TheWrap’s executive editor Adam Chitwood at Sundance.

“But then as the financing process became more difficult, I ended up incorporating a lot of that into the work because it was funny, and I felt like I was leaving a lot on the table about the actual process of making it. The stuff that inspires me most is the stuff that teaches me something, and I really wanted to show the whole process from soup to nuts in a way, just so that people trying to do something similar will have some kind of twisted guidebook.”

Fans of “How To” may find some parallels in “The History of Concrete,” but Wilson believed it was important to try to distance himself from that style as much as possible in favor of a more “skeletal” approach, one in which his frustrations with trying to make a movie that few people seem interested in become an emotional centerpiece.

“My friends keep me going. They’re very motivating in this way that is really important, because I almost stopped making this multiple times,” he said. “I broke one of my main rules with this movie, which is that I usually try to pick subject matter that when I talk to someone about it at a bar, they have their own story that they can throw back at me about it. And whenever I brought up concrete to anybody at a bar it would just flatline.”

“I don’t know, I just really like the challenge of trying to make the most unsexy thing as funny as I can make it,” he added.

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