'The History of Concrete' with John Wilson

John Wilson’s latest feature film, “The History of Concrete” is an idiosyncratic journey about more than just concrete.

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  Hey, it's Ira, and you're listening to Science Friday. When I first heard that I would be interviewing John Wilson about his new documentary called The History of Concrete, boy, it made me really excited because you know, if you listen to this program, how much I am enthralled with the world of concrete. So when I heard there was another concrete geek out there making a film about it, well, we just had to talk and compare notes. Now, I realize that to most people, concrete seems, well, gray, drab, boring, but the film is anything but. In between facts about concrete's reliance on dwindling sand reserves, New York City's

• 0:57Speaker 01

  crumbling infrastructure, there's the story of a struggling musician, a man who preserves tattoos, and a group of runners looping the same block for two months. It follows the idiosyncratic format of Wilson's previous hit HBO show, How To. But I may be the only person who watched this documentary who wanted more concrete facts, so here to tell us about them is John. Welcome to Science Friday.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  What made you decide on concrete as the subject of your first feature film?

• 1:32Speaker 02

  You know, I wanted to pick pretty big subject matter, and I really couldn't think of anything bigger. And it felt almost like a prequel to the How To, in a way, in that, you know, it's kind of the foundation on which everything else is built on. But, I don't know, I mean, I think it started innocently enough with a crack in the foundation to my house that I was trying to figure out, like, how that got there.

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  Is it possible to talk about concrete without getting into a thousand puns, foundation, concrete's ideas?

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it was a minefield, and that, you know, I was trying to, I was trying to avoid it for most of the film. And I think that's like, kind of, part of the fun challenge of it is, is to try to take something that, I don't know, has a million associations with it, and just try to avoid all of them.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  You say it's embarrassing to know so little about something that occupies so much of your visual environment. Tell me more about that.

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  You know, it's one of those things where I would talk to a lot of people about this stuff, and no one really had an opinion about it, aside from people, you know, within the industry, or, you know, that dealt with, kind of, materials that go into concrete. So, I don't know, I did feel a bit that I didn't know anything about it, just because it's everywhere, it's everything.

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  A big part of the film is your quest to get this documentary funded. At one point, you pitched it as a, I love this word, how did you come up with a rockumentary?

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  Yeah, I mean, there are certain puns that I did want to lean into, and, you know, rockumentary being one of them. And it was a kind of contractual obligation that was handed to me at one point, if I wanted to get the movie financed, that basically, I would have to include a musician of elevated visibility or notoriety. And, you know, I kind of both resented that, but also wanted to embrace it at the same time.

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  Yeah, because they couldn't, they couldn't see that concrete could be sizzling enough on its own, couldn't they?

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  Yeah, I mean, I think they were right to a degree, and I think that's, that's, like, you know, why there's this ongoing tension within the film. And, you know, I do include a lot of stuff that I think the industry values, you know, like, whether it's certain narrative plot points, or, you know, incorporating certain imagery of identifiable people. But, you know, I wanted to make kind of a twisted version of that, where you only really see these celebrities for a few frames, instead of being the focus. I wanted the real people in the industry, or affected by the industry, to be the real focus.

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  I hate to say it this way, are there concrete facts that didn't make it into the documentary that you've been itching to share? And now's a perfect time to let go.

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  Well, I do, I do find it kind of shocking how, you know, we're not really going to be able to make it, I think, for another 100 years, with the intensity that we've been using it. I mean, there's a lot of stuff about sands that's really interesting.

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  Yes, let's talk about that.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

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  Yeah. How important it is to concrete. There's an impending shortage. Tell me all about that.

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  Yeah, I mean, China, like, the sand expert says in the movie uses a ton of it. I think Japan used a lot of it within the past, you know, 40 or so years. And we use a lot of it, too. You know, there's this great book, The World in a Grain, that is really just a crash course in how sand is used for everything, and just tells you exactly, like, where we take it from, and how it's affecting shorelines, and kind of offshore reserves, and even stuff inland, you know, like in Long Island, where I grew up. Like, you know, I used to play in a sand pit for most of my childhood, just because

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  it was near my house, but a lot of those reserves are depleted now. And, you know, I just think just this idea of sand wars happening all across the world is something that people don't really think about or talk about, but it's true. And I feel like we have this, this kind of addiction to the material, in a way that I think we need to kind of ease ourselves off from.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, because there's, there's so, so many competing uses for sand, like glass, and people are stealing it for their beaches, all kinds of stuff.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's, that's the thing, is that we take it from these, these shorelines, and these beaches, these like tourist-heavy beaches are being kind of eroded, but there's enough tourism tax money to replenish the beaches, like, every five or 10 years, but it's, it's not sustainable. And, you know, the material that they, the new material they put there disappears within, like, a matter of years. So it's, it's just kind of like, you're putting a Band-Aid on this problem, you know, that is caused by this insatiable appetite.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, you touch on this in the film, but I am always and have been fascinated by how ancient Roman concrete is different from our modern concrete. I mean, you mentioned something about self-healing, right?

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  Yeah, I mean, this is like, one of the number one things that people talk to me about after screenings, is, is they, they claim to know the formula for Roman concrete. There's some environmental factors, like, kind of volcanic ash and other things that contributed to its self-healing properties, so it doesn't really, it's not as compromised over time. But, I don't know, but yeah, then, I just thought it was interesting that after the Roman Empire collapsed, that formula was kind of lost, it was a secret sauce, you know? And, and we didn't really, as a civilization, make concrete for another couple of thousand years.

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  And I just think it's crazy that within the past 100 years or so, we've completely terraformed the earth in this material. I mean, we've done a lot of stuff in the past 100 years, but I just, I find this fact to be kind of interesting, that no one is really questioning that.

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  Not only that, but speaking of longevity of ancient Roman concrete, that concrete that was poured in the 50s and the 60s lasts a lot longer than the stuff we're, we're tearing out now. Sounds like it's planned obsolescence.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, the concrete father-son team that I was talking to, yeah, they said that it was often handmade in the 50s, they used more cement, which contributed to its durability. But, yeah, there's something about how kind of quick and mass-produced it's, it is these days, and, you know, you're seeing the radiating effects of that with things crumbling faster than they should.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  After the break, more with filmmaker John Wilson. Stay with us.

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  You also talk about recycling concrete. I really did not know much about recycling concrete.

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  Yeah, it's a really important process that I think that we should be doing that, you know, a lot more than we do. But I think that, you know, in the film, it's a point, it's kind of a third rail issue because the proximity to the, you know, the local neighborhood is making it impossible to live there in a healthy way. So I think-

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  Because of the dust.

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  Yeah, because of the dust. Yeah, and it's getting, it gets everywhere. It gets through the windows. It shouldn't be put in a place so close to residential housing.

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  Right, right. Speaking, and speaking about residential housing and concrete, one of the most fascinating things to see in your movie, which I had no idea, is different buildings in New York being held together with packing tape, with straps, all kinds of corrosion of the concrete making that necessary. That was just an amazing sight.

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  Yeah, I think I was, I was on kind of a depressing adventure for a couple of years where I had trained my eye to just notice all the imperfections in this material everywhere I went around the world. And it's just this fact of life that we're living with. But, you know, I'm maybe thinking a bit, I'm zooming out a bit too much in this, in this film, I'm afraid sometimes, but I do think that we should kind of think about what goes into making like a thousand-year city versus, you know, a 50-year city.

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  Right. And in that vein, I'm happy you included the deteriorating Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in New York in the film, which is closing down for renovation finally, after literally crumbling for decades. But this is, this is a really big problem in a lot of cities that the concrete's falling apart.

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  Yeah. And yeah, it's one of those things where, you know, thousands of people pass by that part of the BQ every day, just on foot or in cars. And I'm just looking at it and I'm just wondering why no one is talking about this or, you know, why this is the first kind of documentary to address it in a way.

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  I like your philosophy of your film, that you had to use storytelling to sneak in concrete ideas. As you would say, maybe it's, maybe it's better to put the stuff that you like in between the stuff that other people like, so as to get them to be familiar with the stuff they don't otherwise want to think about.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and yeah, I mean, this is, you know, part of the fun of making work with no rules like this, where you can kind of just, you know, have the vegetables in there right next to the marshmallows.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Right, right. How, so how did the film end out, either the same or differently than you thought it would?

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Well, I think when I was pitching the film initially, it was very much just a movie about concrete. And, you know, I would talk about all the kind of depressing ecological trivia during the pitch meetings. And then about a year in of just filming Cracked Sidewalk, I decided to kind of just open the movie up and let a lot of this, the kind of meta elements of its, of its own making flow in. So I ended up throwing out a lot of what I did in the first year. And then, you know, it just became a lot more fun to make, you know, once you're going to the oldest concrete street or, you know, thinking through the lens of a Hallmark movie, you know, it gives you a,

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  I realized that I kind of needed a structure of some kind, even if it was something that felt arbitrary, like a Hallmark film, just to orient myself so that I didn't get lost in this like massive, you know, subject matter.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  And where else would I see you documenting the Concrete Festival in Las Vegas?

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the Bricklaying Competition is amazing. And, but, you know, it's also kind of funny. There was this, there's this Polish movie from the 60s or 70s, I think, called like Man of Marvel, where they have the same kind of bricklaying competition. But that was like a kind of this communist like spectacle where you were supposed to pretend you were happy laying the bricks. But, you know, the, but the Polish people resented being made to pretend to be happy doing it. But here in 2025 or whatever, it's a very patriotic event here. And it's the same action. And I just found that really an interesting evolution over time.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Well, it's a great film. It's got a lot of fun things in it. You learn a lot about concrete in it. I remember learning in engineering school that when you, when you would break concrete, a cylinder, it would crack at a 45-degree angle. I had never seen it before. There it was, right in your movie.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  That's true, yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  There's something in there for everybody, John. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you so much for asking.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  John Wilson, documentary filmmaker in New York City. His new film, go see it, is called The History of Concrete.

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  This episode was produced by Shoshana Buxbaum. Do you have any burning scientific questions you want us to help you answer? Or comments about the show? Well, give us a call. Our number, 877-4-CY-FRY, 877-the-number-4-CY-FRY. I'm Ira Flatow. We'll catch you next time.

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