John Wilson

“One of my greatest fears is there not being a record of something important.”

“New York City is the best character - it's constantly renewing itself, constantly regenerating itself, losing itself. It makes me want to film as much of it as I can before it disappears.”

“I don't know what kind of lobotomy they get in advertising school, but they find bits of pop culture or art that has a soul, and they either try to get the artists themselves to collaborate with them, and if they can't, then they get someone to imitate it and rip the heart out of whatever the art was.”

“A lot of nonfiction filmmakers try to hide the fact that there's a camera filming everything, and they make the subjects pretend like there's nobody else there. To me, the fact that I'm there filming adds a unique tension to the whole scene.”

“Engaging with the subject from behind the camera feels like the least artificial way for me to conduct an interview.”

“I've been toying around with the whole 'how to' genre for a little while actually. I just love that style of editing and the narrative possibilities.”

“Someone told me that they wished that my voice was two octaves lower.”

“We're all recording our lives one way or another.”

“Every dumpster tells a story!”

“I don't know why people are so afraid of just, like, doing something new.”

“I used to go to a Blockbuster every weekend and I used to dumpster dive all the movie advertisements that they were throwing out.”

“I want to make 'New York Post: The Movie.' It's about a man who wakes up one morning and finds that he's trapped inside a copy of the New York Post.”

“The scariest thing was just entering the Bang Energy Life CEO's mansion in Florida. That was I think the fastest my heart had beaten up until that moment during production.”

“I have this weird thing where I have to process things emotionally on a stage rather than one-to-one, sometimes.”

“I just like to explore different communities that I haven't seen represented in other media.”

“I feel closest to New York, just having grown up in and around here. And I have a complicated relationship with it, which makes it a rich subject matter. And the people have a certain quality here that I'm not sure I could find somewhere else.”

“You can tell immediately if someone wants to be recorded or not. And in that moment, when they give you an inch and you continue talking to them, and you raise the camera a little higher, a little higher, you begin to realize that oh, my God, so many people have a story.”

“There's a psychotic amount of footage that I get. I watch 100 percent of it from every single camera department, including my own stuff. I just spend day and night making selects and just trying to find shots.”

“Hudson Yards is a very hostile space for, uh, documentarians.”

“Yeah, I like Ron Howard!”