How to live a long life filled with regret.
Cosmo Bjorkenheim: I feel like, in your work, there’s a tension between the desire to catalogue trivia and to turn it into something else that says something about the city more broadly, or even America more broadly. But really the moments that I find myself treasuring the most in your work often is this meticulous cataloguing of these little trivial moments.
John Wilson: Yeah, but it’s also – Fielder kind of taught me restraint in a way. I could just go endlessly with these things, and I think that he made sure that I only use the best stuff. At the end of the day, even if the work fails as a memoir or a comedy, I hope it still succeeds at the very least as raw footage of New York and all these little things that are fun to notice. And that's why I wanted to keep all of the material kind of naked, so it can be pulled for archival purposes.
Cosmo Bjorkenheim in conversation with John Wilson1
- 1Cosmo Bjorkenheim, “How To with John Wilson: An Intimate Basement Interview”, Screen Slate, 2020.
