Street photography was a much larger inspiration than film in a way, because there\u2019s this energy and danger to it that I really like and that I hadn\u2019t really seen performed in motion. Literature is also really important as an inspiration: the way that a lot of memoirs or true crime stuff\u2014Hunter S. Thompson\u2019s Hell\u2019s Angels, or something like that\u2014will 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.<\/p>\n
Rail: Would you think of your work as kind of a sideways version of gonzo journalism?<\/p>\n
Wilson: Yeah. Johnzo.<\/p>\n
Rail: [Laughing] Hell yeah.<\/p>\n
Wilson: You read the Abbas Kiarostami book, Lessons with Kiarostami, and he very openly talks about what he fabricates and exactly how it\u2019s 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\u2019s no purity there\u2014I 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\u2019re 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\u2019s what I try so hard to make sure I\u2019m delivering. But in terms of the sequence in which things happen, there are obviously some things that you\u2019ll never know about. [Laughs]<\/p>\n
Rail: Sure, not everything has to be F for Fake on its face.<\/p>\n
Wilson: Yeah, it gets to be a little too much sometimes.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
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\u2019t like to give easy answers in the work; I want it to be the beginning of a larger conversation.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t think we need to necessarily make better concrete. I think that we need to question this material wholesale as something that we shouldn\u2019t produce in this quantity. I don\u2019t want to be so Al Gore about it, but we\u2019re not going to be able to make it pretty soon\u2014within the next fifty or so years\u2014because of the lack of natural resources we\u2019re going to have soon matched with the demand for it.<\/p>\n
Now\u2026 why am I trying to sound this alarm? I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d want one of my tattoos preserved after I died because of Mean Gene the Embalming Machine.<\/p>\n
Wilson:\u00a0Would you ever donate your skin?<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0Oh, of course.<\/p>\n
Wilson:\u00a0Wow.<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0That sounds\u2014I mean, I mostly write about horror movies. I think that sounds awesome.<\/p>\n
Wilson:\u00a0Okay.<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0Do you have any tattoos?<\/p>\n
Wilson:\u00a0I have a few.<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0Would you give them to a buddy or a partner?<\/p>\n
Wilson:\u00a0I haven\u2019t really thought about that yet. I feel like\u2026 I haven\u2019t thought about my body yet.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s too dangerous to preserve, and NIMBYism too.<\/p>\n
Rail: Also with cinema as an act of taxidermy in that same way.<\/p>\n
Wilson: True.<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0Okay, going back to the city: you talk a lot about Eric Adams\u2019s \u201cCity of Yes\u201d housing plan, but a lot has changed since then. How do you feel the city is progressing under Mamdani? There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Wilson:\u00a0I 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\u2019s 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, \u201cThis is what we\u2019re going to be doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zohran\u2019s been cool! The scaffolding stuff he\u2019s doing seems cool\u2014it\u2019s nice that they\u2019re trying to make it aesthetically nicer\u2014but at this point who even knows if taking scaffolding down is the right idea with all this infrastructure crumbling? It\u2019s funny how one project can sometimes negate the way you feel about the resolution that you thought you had with another project. Change again\u2026<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0Last thing: how was the chewing gum wine?<\/p>\n
Wilson:\u00a0I\u2019m 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\u2019ll bring some to the premiere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Street photography was a much larger inspiration than film in a way, because there\u2019s this energy and danger…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366275,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-366274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}