While filmmaker John Wilson was touring his latest movie, The History of Concrete, around Europe, he was gifted a large slab of the material.
“I had to fly from Barcelona to Warsaw with a ton of concrete in my bag that I thought was basically contraband because it was sidewalk tiles that people literally ripped out of the ground [in Barcelona] to give to me,” he tells Vogue over Zoom. “Thankfully, they didn’t weigh my bag at all on the Polish airline.”
This wasn’t an isolated incident; other concrete gifts that Wilson has accumulated this year now decorate the backyard in Ridgewood, Queens. Others function as ornaments on his coffee table. “I don’t want to discourage anyone from giving me more concrete, but just try to be mindful about how far away I am from home, potentially,” Wilson quips. (Perhaps his micro-movie theater Low Cinema in Ridgewood would be the best spot to deliver him such a dense bounty.)
So why concrete, and why a feature-length film (Wilson’s first) about it? It’s a long story. “I accidentally made a movie, in certain ways,” Wilson says.
The History of Concrete follows his successful HBO docuseries, How To With John Wilson. In a lull between projects, with the Writers Guild on strike, we see Wilson sign up for the only class they are offering: how to write and sell a Hallmark movie. In it, an instructor draws out the core tenets of the Hallmark brand: aspiration, escapism, love, and inspiration. “Trauma is fine if it ends on a high note,” she says cheerily. “You get bonus points for dead relatives.”
When the foundation of his house begins to crack and the basement floods, Wilson becomes fascinated with the ubiquity of concrete in our modern lives. “It’s embarrassing to know so little about something that occupies so much of your visual environment,” he narrates while the camera pans into a freshly paved sidewalk. Thus begins an odyssey that will take Wilson to Rome, Astoria, a 3,100-mile race in Queens, a Las Vegas concrete convention, a rock concert, and back, all in the effort to secure funding to make a movie about concrete, guided by the principles of the Hallmark class.
Though the pace of production was different, The History of Concrete can be viewed as an extension of the How To series, in which Wilson explored everything from the mundane process of putting up scaffolding to “How to Be Spontaneous.” What unites these seemingly disparate topics is Wilson’s knack for putting himself into scenarios with unusual people that lead him into unexpected territory—a lesson in the virtues of simple observation.
