John Wilson

“I want to remove all artifice from my work, in a way, by just having a very direct relationship with the people I am filming.”

“That's what I feel like video and film can do best is create an archive, a document of a very specific time and place. And I'm always worried about losing things.”

“You've got to make your own entertainment sometimes.”

“I don't like to talk about big ideas until I start formally working on it.”

“My obsession with documentary coincided with this job I had where I worked for a private investigator for about a year after graduating. I would watch all of this really banal footage every day and I would have to train myself to find these little moments to send to lawyers of people jumping out of wheelchairs and stuff like that.”

“I don't really think of myself as much as a landlord because my good friends live in the units beneath me.”

“This idea of purity in nonfiction, it's silly to me.”

“With any bad thing that happens to me in my life, if I do something productive with that bad feeling or that bad event, then I feel better. It's like, 'This good thing would've never happened if that bad thing never happened.' I always am searching for that, whatever that good thing.”

“I have a little collection of miniature toilets that I'm going to try to display somewhere, maybe.”

“The guy that taught me how to cook risotto lives right down the street and I see him all the time. I go to his yard sales.”

“I'm on Zillow a lot.”

“I think boredom is one of my great ways of inspiring myself.”

“The only two requirements I have for a camera are that it turns on quickly and has a great zoom.”

“I've seen 'Endless Summer' more than any other documentary. I don't even like surfing, but I just love Bruce Brown's positivity. He's so stoked about everything he's talking about. He always thanks you at the end of his documentaries, which makes me tear up sometimes.”

“It just bums me out when some people hear 'documentary,' and they think 'Blackfish.'”

“I consider myself a bit of an eccentric, and I relate very deeply to other people that have niche obsessions.”

“It's unfortunate that a lot of the time in documentaries, the camera person isn't a personality. That's such a wasted opportunity.”

“I organize all my footage by the date it was shot, and then arrange everything in a timeline once I begin a project. I also keep a meticulous daily log.”

“Ron Howard is just a funny legacy director. As a film nerd, he's kind of a funny person to valorize.”

“Everyone watches how-to tutorials. Everyone makes them.”