The filmmaker usedHow Toas a Trojan horse for all his grudges against New York City.
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Note: Spoilers ahead for the series finale ofHow to With John Wilson.
Just three years ago, whenHow Todebuted, this concern would have seemed absurd.
Despite this, season three succeeded in upping the ante.
In the time Wilson spends with this companys clients, he begins to question the pursuits advertised merits.
Just because somethingcanlive on forever doesnt necessarily mean it should.
MaybeHow Towas the instructional guide the world needed all along.
The producers of the Court TV shows didnt have any luck reaching out to him either.
It was just something to do, you know?
A classic hobby.Youve got to make your own entertainment sometimes.
Maybe its obvious, but thats what the camera allows me to do.
It gives a purpose to both parties.
Those environments you want to spend time in often end up being these niche communities or subcultures.
I read that, even before the show, you made a film aboutballoon fetishists.
And more recently you produceda documentaryabout the carpet industry.
Like this season, it was the vacuum-cleaner collectors.
Im wearing one of their shirts right now; its theWizard of Ozcharacters, and they all have vacuums.
I just found it so exhilarating being in the center of that community.
The whole project of the show is very anthropological in that way.
I findthemvery freakish in a way that I dont want to touch.
I went around telling anyone who would listen that the anti-circumcision guy liked my tweet.Yeah, hes very active.
I think he was really excited to have the platform for it.
He looks up to me, and hes like, So were you permanently traumatized by the reverse-circumcision guy?
I started cracking up hysterically.
Theyre exposing him to this information early, for sure.Yeah.
I didnt ask if he was circumcised.
I dont think that would have been right.
The show did have a tendency to get graphic.
There were a lot of shots of bodily fluids and scatological references.
But I was always a big John Waters fan.
I love how he mentions, in one book of his, something about the tyranny of good taste.
I think thats something thats worth fighting against: Who decides what is good taste?
I think the toilet, and especially fecal matter, has a way of challenging that somehow.
I like to include stuff like that so it never feels too pedantic.
I noticed in the show that you have a whole collection of toilet-themed memorabilia.
Its a theme you returned to throughout the show, as early as the scaffolding episode.
I just decided to nest all my civic-design commentary within my film work.
A lot of documentarians attempt to keep themselves out of their films as much as possible.
But I did not know that Bruce was a former police officer.
That was kind of a red herring that something was going to happen in there.
He was kind of unimpressed.
But I wanted to ensure that he had no idea until the last possible second.
The audience always seems to get obsessed with picking apart whats real and whats staged.
I think all documentary is fiction in this way.
Youarecrafting and youaremanipulating, and there is no real purity.
Thats what I was struggling with as people started to interrogate me about what was real and what wasnt.
But you could also do both.
Do you think there is a connective tissue between these docu-comedy shows?
Your show,Jury Duty,The Rehearsal, andPaul T. Goldman?I dont think youre wrong.
I lovePaul T. Goldman.
But I think there is something exciting happening within the world of nonfiction.
Its hard to say.
Those were some of my favorite moments in the show.
I always think of the moment when heturned over the pepper.Yeah, exactly.
I think Nathan and I share a similar fascination with the way things are produced.
The other thing you talked about in the Birds episode is your insatiable need to find rare images.
Its just something that drives you.
That is an unbeatable feeling, especially when I have a container for it like the show.
That feeling hasnt really died.
Im still looking for those images; Im just trying to figure out where to put them now.
The imagery of Burning Man was some of the most boring imagery Ive ever seen.
Its just the same kind of sculpture and the same kind of art replicated a thousand times.
People are just really stuck up there.
I could go on and on.
But even that was extremely hard to do, because the people there put up so many roadblocks.
Im glad we werent able to use the footage now.
Thematically, it made the Restroom episode stronger, because its all about gatekeeping and access to things.
Whats become of some of the larger set pieces you used in the show?
I think its in the woodshop right now where it was fabricated.
Its ultimately just because I dont want to pay for a storage space.
But it all exists.
I think itd be cool to have some kind of exhibit of everything, at least temporarily.
I wanted to talk about the finale.
How painstaking was it to find the right button to put on the series in the final monologue?
It was just little lines here and there about the city being both our healer and oppressor.
And that became the final climactic moment.
I think thats kind of my default state a lot of the time.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
