Street photography was a much larger inspiration than film in a way, because there’s this energy and danger to it that I really like and that I hadn’t really seen performed in motion. Literature is also really important as an inspiration: the way that a lot of memoirs or true crime stuff—Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, or something like that—will do really interesting things formally and jump through time and kind of Frankenstein together these personal narratives into this larger portrait of a subculture or something like that.
Rail: Would you think of your work as kind of a sideways version of gonzo journalism?
Wilson: Yeah. Johnzo.
Rail: [Laughing] Hell yeah.
Wilson: You read the Abbas Kiarostami book, Lessons with Kiarostami, and he very openly talks about what he fabricates and exactly how it’s done. Even in one of my favorite movies, Close-Up (1990), he talks about how he filmed a lot of reaction shots in a court scene after the whole scene was done. When you make anything, every single part of it is a subjective decision. There’s no purity there—I was trying to get to that in a way with the episode of How To about how to watch birds. I was trying to become closer to the audience by revealing something that I had staged as a way of making a point: the chronology of a lot of what you’re seeing is not as it seems. I understand the impulse to pick something apart, and I want people to feel that when they watch the work, because that’s what I try so hard to make sure I’m delivering. But in terms of the sequence in which things happen, there are obviously some things that you’ll never know about. [Laughs]
Rail: Sure, not everything has to be F for Fake on its face.
Wilson: Yeah, it gets to be a little too much sometimes.
Rail: Returning to those change and artifice themes, I was thinking a lot about Walter Benjamin and mechanical reproduction watching Concrete. You also directly reference Guy Debord’s work in the movie. As you were just talking about how literature impacts you, I was curious about your relationship to philosophy as a film essayist?
Wilson: Well, my co-producer Francis Carr and I would talk a lot about the different themes of the movie, these ideas of impermanence, and then we started to think about who had the most clearly worded perspective on them, whether it was Buddhism or The Society of the Spectacle. A lot of my work has barroom philosophy in it, so you can think about these things broadly. I never want to be too pedantic with it, but I like to place those larger philosophical ideas in there so you can understand what I was leaning towards in the past twenty minutes of seemingly unrelated threads. I don’t like to give easy answers in the work; I want it to be the beginning of a larger conversation.
The number of people who came up after screenings and told me they knew the formula for Roman concrete was really funny, because I don’t think we need to necessarily make better concrete. I think that we need to question this material wholesale as something that we shouldn’t produce in this quantity. I don’t want to be so Al Gore about it, but we’re not going to be able to make it pretty soon—within the next fifty or so years—because of the lack of natural resources we’re going to have soon matched with the demand for it.
Now… why am I trying to sound this alarm? I don’t know. [Laughs] But it was one of those things that I never really thought about. I want us to be thinking about what other elements our cities could be made of and how much influence industry actually has on how we view things.
Rail: Was there anyone you enjoyed talking to most for this project? As soon as I watched Concrete, I actually ended up asking a lot of my friends whether they’d want one of my tattoos preserved after I died because of Mean Gene the Embalming Machine.
Wilson: Would you ever donate your skin?
Rail: Oh, of course.
Wilson: Wow.
Rail: That sounds—I mean, I mostly write about horror movies. I think that sounds awesome.
Wilson: Okay.
Rail: Do you have any tattoos?
Wilson: I have a few.
Rail: Would you give them to a buddy or a partner?
Wilson: I haven’t really thought about that yet. I feel like… I haven’t thought about my body yet.
But yeah, the tattoo guys were really cool to talk to. I really liked their perspective about the body as a sentimental object, but not in a fully taxidermized way. It makes some people really squeamish, but I found it so fascinating and it ties in with these themes of what’s too dangerous to preserve, and NIMBYism too.
Rail: Also with cinema as an act of taxidermy in that same way.
Wilson: True.
Rail: Okay, going back to the city: you talk a lot about Eric Adams’s “City of Yes” housing plan, but a lot has changed since then. How do you feel the city is progressing under Mamdani? There’s been a lot of movement on some of these infrastructure issues, like the new proposal for repairing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, whose structural decay you reference in Concrete.
Wilson: I feel fine in my neighborhood at the moment, and I hope the BQE thing works out well. I think it really does take an iron fist to make a decision like that, because there’s so much NIMBYism within a couple square miles of the triple cantilever. You do need to be resolute like Robert Moses in certain ways, and just say, “This is what we’re going to be doing.”
Zohran’s been cool! The scaffolding stuff he’s doing seems cool—it’s nice that they’re trying to make it aesthetically nicer—but at this point who even knows if taking scaffolding down is the right idea with all this infrastructure crumbling? It’s funny how one project can sometimes negate the way you feel about the resolution that you thought you had with another project. Change again…
Rail: Last thing: how was the chewing gum wine?
Wilson: I’m not really much of a critic when it comes to wine, nor can I really, like, tell things apart. But I think the gum wine was good. Hopefully he’ll bring some to the premiere.