'How To With John Wilson' Courtesy of HBO Max HBO cult icon John Wilson (How to With John Wilson) took the Danish capital on Thursday morning, appearing at the industry conference of the 23rd edition of CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.
In conversation with Thom Powers, a veteran documentary programmer of TIFF and Pure Nonfiction, he discussed his work and career, his dry wit and his latest feature, The History of Concrete.
“I don’t want to die” was his first thought when the show was greenlit, Wilson shared about the HBO series How to With John Wilson. So, how did he and his collaborator, Nathan Fielder, approach it? “We had to narrativize” his lived experience to provide an arc over the course of a season, the creator explained. Small talk was their first topic, given that they are both “socially anxious,” Wilson shared. “We ended up going to spring break in Cancun.” But he met a young man whose friend had just killed himself, he recalled.
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Discussing his general approach to non-fiction, he said: “I really don’t like manipulating the image. I like it to be as raw as possible.” Full-frame, meaning fully zoomed out, shots are his default mode, he added. That also allows the camera to capture things on the edges of the frame. Wilson compared super-focused images to a “plague” and “a waste of an image.”
Addressing whether there is a performance element to his work, he offered: “I also play a Mr. Magoo-type, Mr. Bean-type character who is not really that far from what I am actually like.” He tends to go into the environment he explores without research instead of faking surprise, Wilson explained, comparing it to Frederick Wiseman’s way.
Street photography, a la Robert Frank and William Eggleston, is a key inspiration for him, Wilson also shared. “I like the artist as a recording instrument,” he also told the conference.
TV was “cool and consistent” and provided a steady paycheck, “which I miss,” comparing the experience to being Willy Wonka in the Chocolate Factory, but he wanted to go into features, Wilson told the Copenhagen crowd.
Why did he land on concrete, which, he acknowledged, was “turned out to be extraordinarily difficult to pitch”? Wilson explained that he wasn’t so interested in the austerity of the material or “the kind of fascist beauty of it” but “just wanted to get into the actual material which nobody was talking about.” And, he added, to laughter: “I feel concrete was also extremely unsexy.”
Wilson screened a pitch video he made for the film, which offered that it would be “the Oppenheimer of concrete, or the Barbie movie of concrete.”
The filmmaker shared that the budget of the film was “so much lower” than the series budget, offering: “There was no budget at all.” Asked about reports that there was a suggestion to not make The History of Concrete his usual brand of essayistic doc but an animated film, Wilson shared with a smile: “My agent has some really funny ideas.”
Where does Wilson take his career next? “I want to try to pitch another TV series that I have in mind,” he shared, without providing details. “I have no idea how that’s going to go. I think it’s a much more complicated ask in a lot of ways, both legally and production value-wise.”
Wilson finished this year’s “A Morning With” event series, which also featured Irish documentary director Sinéad O’Shea (All About the Money) and Poh Si Teng (American Doctor).
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