I think pretty much all movies are good, in a way, even if not for the reasons they were intended to be good. Every movie is of value to somebody or someone, whether it’s in the costume design or the locations. And I think that trying to find value in films that you may have forgotten about is a cool challenge.
Did you ever see “The Flick,” by Annie Baker?
No.
It’s a play that’s set in a movie theatre like this. You would love it. She’s one of my favorite playwrights—and actually, like you, she’s someone whose work I often have trouble explaining. I just tell people to go see it. Similarly, when I heard that you had a new movie, I didn’t need to be pitched on it. And then I watched it, and a lot of the movie is about you struggling to pitch the movie to funders.
I still don’t really know how to pitch this film. I usually start with a title, and “The History of Concrete” really stuck with me. I felt like it had some gravity to it—
No pun intended.
I’m dodging puns left and right with this movie. I mean, I came up with the title because I was genuinely interested in the material, and I did want to make the definitive film about it, you know? But I also like to make comedies, and I knew that it would be the hardest thing to make funny. And there was something about that that really excited me, even though it was agonizing at points to get it made.
Is it true that you looked up the title on Amazon?
When I first came up with the title, I looked on the internet to see if it already existed, and found one book on Amazon called “The History of Concrete,” which turned out to be just an empty book that was a place to store your valuables. I thought that was really funny—not even the most determined thief would have the courage to open a book with a title that boring.
And then you thought, “The movie industry is dying. There’s no more funding. Let me go try to get funding for a movie called ‘The History of Concrete.’ ”
I think I understood the absurdity of trying to pitch a concept like this in 2024. But it was what I consider a fun challenge. It’s hard, especially in nonfiction, to get people to come on a journey with you where there’s no beginning, middle, or end, and you just have a broad idea. And, with financiers, even if you had a successful project beforehand, you still need to prove yourself and start from scratch, in a way, with each concept, because the world is constantly changing and the appetite—or the perceived appetite—of the crowd is constantly changing.
To me, one of the interesting questions about your work has to do with genre. You’ve mentioned comedy, you’ve mentioned nonfiction. People sometimes say “video art.” I think all of those could apply—and I do think it has to be seen as art, on some level, for it to make sense—but I’m curious about when you first started to think about the genre of the stuff that you make.
I feel like I never really know what I’m making or why I’m filming certain things. But once you have enough of it, you can then begin to kind of shape it into something. Like, I think it’s good to start with an idea. Then you begin to make that thing, and you leave a huge part of it empty, and you allow the world to kind of fill the rest of that in, whatever shape that takes. By the end, you have this strange hybrid of what you intended to make versus what the world delivered to you.
As I was driving over here, I felt like I was seeing the world through John Wilson B-roll—some of the stuff I saw was just weird enough or inexplicable enough that I thought, if I were you, I would definitely have filmed it and marked it as something to use. Is that kind of how it works?
