John Wilson Didn’t See That Ending Coming Either

Explaining an episode of How to With John Wilson is like trying to diagram the world’s most complicated sentence. The HBO series, which has just wrapped its third and final season, presents itself as the video diary of a dedicated flaneur, roaming New York City with camera in hand, narrating as he goes. The first episode, “How to Make Small Talk,” starts off straightforwardly enough, even if Wilson’s halting voice-over doesn’t seem to make him the ideal authority on navigating social situations. But by the end of the episode, he’s accidentally crashed an MTV spring-break taping in Cancún, and he tries to make conversation with some aggressively uninterested partiers. One moment he’s trying to learn the finer points of wine appreciation; the next, he’s recounting the story of how his college a cappella group collided with the NXIVM sex cult. How To’s focus is ostensibly provincial: Each episode opens with Wilson’s droning “Hey, New York,” as if he refuses to entertain the possibility that it might be seen by anyone outside a 10-block radius. (For years, his day job was shooting local TV infomercials, and How To cultivates the vibe of something that might have been broadcast from a basement on public-access TV.) But as the show’s three seasons illustrate, a journey that starts in New York City can take you almost anywhere, given enough imagination (and enough of HBO’s money).

“How to Track Your Package,” How To’s series finale, follows a similarly winding path. Wilson begins with the familiar urban scourge of package theft, hitting up a mail depot and a fortuneteller in search of an errant eBay purchase. But the singular inquiry keeps spiraling outward: The psychic who’s meant to locate Wilson’s package also has thoughts about why his romantic relationships keep failing, and the camera one man sets up to ensnare package thieves also catches two passersby talking about what a mess his apartment is. An apparent misunderstanding about transporting organs—he means the kinds that save lives but ends up with the kind you play in church—eventually leads Wilson to a “life-extension” facility in Arizona where people’s bodies are put into a deep freeze in the hopes they can be revived by future technologies.

Although Wilson is rarely spied in How To’s three seasons, or the eight years of online shorts that preceded its HBO run, his personality suffuses every frame, and in conversation, he’s exactly what you’d expect: sharp but unassuming, seduced by tangents but always returning to the point. I spoke to him about bringing this decadelong project to a close, the shot he still feels guilty about, and when he knew it was time to blow up a car. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Sam Adams: You knew going in that you wanted the third season to be the last, and you even had some of the episode titles picked out in advance. So what made “How to Track Your Package” the episode you wanted to end on?

John Wilson: I think I had all the episode titles written before I started filming anything for Season 3, but “How to Track Your Package” was not originally the last one. We did some shuffling as we were finishing editing, and “How to Track Your Package” became an obvious point to end on, just because of where thematically we ended up. Most episodes start pretty innocently as a way to explore this one problem within the city, but then once we got to the cryogenics conference, I realized that we were dealing with some of the biggest ideas of the series yet. When you’re looking into infinity in that way, that felt like a natural place to end up.

So, just to be clear about how the episodes work, you didn’t know, when you started making an episode about missing packages, that you were going to end up at a facility in Arizona where they freeze people’s bodies so they can potentially live forever?

No.

A facility that, for some reason, has an Emmy in it.

Really?

Yeah. It’s sitting on top of a bookshelf in Alcor’s offices, right next to a framed quote from Walt Disney.

Well, they accomplished what I could not in many ways. [Editor’s note: According to an Alcor representative, the Emmy belonged to Carol Burnett Show writer Dick Clair, who is cryopreserved in an Alcor facility.]

You’ve said that deciding in advance that this was the final season freed you up to address subjects you didn’t feel comfortable touching on earlier. What kinds of subjects did you feel more comfortable getting into this time around?

In “How to Work Out,” I deal with the impact that the show has had on my life, and the fantasy you live with as you try to reach a certain status artistically. I wanted to talk about the way that the show has affected my life in a way that might’ve felt premature earlier. And there was also the “How to Watch Birds” episode, revealing the way that certain things in the show are fabricated, just for comic effect sometimes, and my struggle with what’s truth and what’s a lie, and does it even matter. I just really wanted to swing for the fences in any way that I could, putting in these b-roll sequences that I always wanted to put in, or maybe some more-sensitive memoir stuff that I think makes the work stronger but was definitely a little hard to put in there.

At what point did you decide you wanted to blow up a car?

I decided that pretty early in the writing process. I really liked the idea of my car as this kind of character that runs throughout the series, and destroying this icon of the show felt like an important thing to do during the final go-round. But I do still have my car.

I’m glad.

We bought a duplicate Volvo that we rigged with explosives and had it shipped all the way out to Tennessee. It was just a huge production operation. I could write a whole little book about the production of the birds episode. As long as I had the budget from HBO, I wanted to use it in a way that I thought would be really interesting and fitting for an episode.

It’s like when you’re watching a cop show on network TV and they burn down the precinct house in the next-to-last episode. No one’s going to need it after next week, so we might as well do something interesting.

I’m excited to see, after the episode comes out, how people feel when they see me driving around in my car again in real life.

What did you tell Bruce Beveridge about the part he was playing in that episode? You bring him on to talk about the conspiracy theory that it was actually the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic, that was sunk, and you end up suggesting that he’s been murdered for getting too close to the truth.

I’m trying to think what the timeline was. He didn’t live too far from the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge, so he met us there and we just did a basic interview in a library at first. Then we got a motel room and just asked him if he wanted to hang out in Pigeon Forge for a day or two. And he said sure. So he and I just hung out. We got food together; we went to a few of the big attractions on the strip there. Everything is completely natural up until the point when I go into the hotel, when I’m asking him about whether it’s OK to tell a lie or ask him what his definition of the truth is. Those were all organic moments just between us, and he had no idea there was this entire apparatus that was puppeteering this situation that was about to happen.

After I went into the hotel, I shot what I needed to in there, and I came out and I told him exactly what the entire plot of the episode was. I told him that we were about to blow up a duplicate version of the car that he was sitting in. He seemed a little unimpressed, but he wanted to invite his wife to watch the car blow up because he thought that would be cool. So he called her, and she came, and then we had the whole pyrotechnics team come. I wanted to make sure that he didn’t really know until the last possible second.

It’s interesting to get to the penultimate episode of the series and have you expressing what seems like genuine guilt over having misrepresented certain footage over the course of the series. Because for me, from the very first episode, this is a show that’s about constructing meaning more than it is finding it. Your voice-over often feels like it’s coming from a person who’s already locked into an idea or a certain metaphor, and then you have to twist it on the fly to fit the images we’re seeing. So, in a sense, it doesn’t matter if they’re true. I remember watching the bit you admit to faking, where we see a backed-up toilet spewing sewage several feet in the air, and wondering, How did they get that? But it didn’t occur to me to be concerned whether it was fake, partly because it’s not important, but also because sometimes I just choose credulity for the sake of going along with the story.

I just wanted to be able to point to that episode, in case anyone ever accuses the show of fabricating something, and prove that it doesn’t matter in a way. You are witnessing a real thing, and are you not entertained? I’m always looking around when I watch other stuff too, just knowing the way that things are constructed. And I also like to choose credulity at the same time, because it makes it more fun to watch the work. I was so obsessed with purity, going into the project of How To as it was on HBO, and I was really strict about it. It was this nagging thing that I couldn’t escape whenever there was any manipulation done, and it made me feel really dishonest—and I was also having some other trust issues with people in my life at the time. So it was this multilayered thing: Is it a lie if you don’t tell someone everything you’re thinking?

It’s interesting, because in a sense you already had that footage of the erupting toilet, as a found video from the internet. And you say that part of what drove you to re-create it is that you couldn’t bear the idea that the image wasn’t yours. Did you ever consider just using the internet video?

No. That’s not the way I like to work. There were two factors. One was that it was a vertical video and we don’t ever use that. As a rule, the show is all wide. But I also don’t use footage from people who don’t work directly on the show. I want it to all be in-house. I don’t want you to be able to reverse–Google image search any one of the images.

Part of the instructions you issued to your camera crews was that you didn’t want anything to look like it came off Getty Images.

Yeah. Or if it does, it should be as kind of saccharine as possible, in a way. There’s some pretty shots of the skyline and stuff, but I try to make it so that it’s no tripod shots at all. Everything has to have the same hand-held quality to it.

The disillusioning moment for me was learning that How To makes use of several second-unit crews to gather most of the on-the-street footage. You never say you’re shooting it all yourself, so at worst it’s a lie of omission, but the show feels like the product of one person just endlessly wandering around New York City—although for one person to gather all those images, they’d have to be either incredibly lucky or spend years doing nothing else.

Yeah. I’ve seen people have a similar reaction after either reading interviews or seeing a Q&A. But I just want people to know that however we get somewhere, what you’re seeing is a real person doing a real thing. That is something that I have very little wiggle room with. I like to make sure that this is the real version of that person. There’s not a single actor. I mean, I don’t know what they do in their spare time, but they are these people.

Are there any other fabrications you would like to take this opportunity to get off your chest?

Nope.

You’ve said that every reality TV show would seem much weirder if you just extended every shot by a few seconds, and you do that in the final run of How To episodes as well, wrapping up an interview and then showing yourself paying the subject for it. Is that something you did a lot during the run of the show?

Depends on the subject. Travis Walton, the UFO guy, he is a bit more of a media personality, and those were the terms that he agreed to talk to us under. But money is rarely exchanged. I wanted to include the payout because in an episode about documentary ethics, we thought it was a really funny way to expose ourselves. And also, it’s not that I don’t believe what he was saying, but the transactional nature of it kind of makes you think twice about what the purpose of this lifelong career as a public speaker about UFOs is. But also, the show does occupy a very weird niche where it is a documentary but I don’t have the same journalistic ethics as you might. I can buy someone lunch.

It’s very funny that it plays like you might be trying to rip him off a little bit, like, “Oh, sorry, I left the rest of the money in the car.”

I genuinely took the wrong envelope.

It feels like one of the abiding themes of How To as a whole is loneliness. You’re always connecting with people who have these oddball passions that set them apart. Whether you’re at a gathering of vacuum cleaner collectors or people who wish they could live in the world of the Avatar movies, there’s a real sense of people desperate to find community, even if they don’t know that that’s what they’re doing.

The constant struggle with loneliness is something that I feel like a lot of people can identify with. And I think that it ultimately, I hope, makes the work a lot more relatable. It’s something I’ve definitely struggled with a lot. These are real things that I’m working through in the show, like when the psychic in the package episode keeps telling me over and over again that I have commitment issues. It’s not wrong, but it’s something I’m working through. Honestly, it’s something I feel like I’m on the other side of now, as the show is drawing to a close. I do feel a lot less lonely because of a lot of this stuff. There’s a lot of communities and ways of connecting that I want to elevate and just make people feel more comfortable embracing the thing you thought was embarrassing. I thought it was so weird that people would hide their vacuum obsession, of all things.

You do throw in some pretty strong tongue-in-cheek hints that it isn’t just about vacuum cleaners, pointing out how this group seems to solely attract men, how they have strong associations between cleaning and their mothers, even asking one of them when they “came out” as a collector of antique vacuum cleaners.

I did try to nest some kind of sexuality stuff in there, just because I kind of got a vibe at the convention. But they ultimately didn’t really know, couldn’t really tell me why they loved vacuums so much. I think in the same way we can’t really pin down why we’re obsessed with a lot of different things. We can look back to childhood, but I don’t know—I love that they had houses filled with vacuums but they could not tell me why it started.

Speaking of loneliness, let’s talk about the interview you ultimately decided to end the entire series with. You’re talking to a man who’s planning to have his head frozen by Alcor when he dies, and up until then, we’ve kind of just seen him as a bit of a kook. But then he starts relating this story about self-castration that is both horrific and strangely moving. It’s not quite the last thing in the show, but he’s the last person you talk to. Why end with him?

Well, I wanted to give the audience all of the tools they would need to get over the ending of the show.

In other words, you felt that after watching that interview, they wouldn’t want to watch anymore.

Yeah. Again, I didn’t initially plan for that to be the closing interview. And that episode is longer than the other ones. I liked starting the season, in the restroom episode, with a shot where the Empire State Building looks like someone’s erection, and then ending with this castration. There’s some symmetry there. I think there’s a lot in the series that has to do with pleasure and the denial of pleasure, but also extremes in all its forms. And I found that to be one of the most obviously shocking and drastic ways to deal with the problem of desire. You desire things to work; you desire relationships to continue or whatever. And it is the ultimate punctuation mark for all of that. It also kind of rhymes with the guy in the circumcision episode in the first season, where this guy is trying to restore his foreskin in order to receive as much pleasure as he possibly can, and then this other guy is doing the complete opposite. I don’t know what those guys would be like in the same room together, but I like having both ends of the spectrum represented.

I confess I had to watch that interview twice, because the first time I was just busy processing the words coming out of his mouth. But on reflection, there is something really poignant about it. This is a person who obviously had some incredibly difficult times as a teenager, the kind a lot of people don’t survive, and yet he’s deeply invested in wanting more life, and he’s willing to stay frozen for as many centuries as it takes for the possibility of realizing that dream.

He might outlive us all, which is the most interesting part of that interview to me. It was just so interesting talking to him, almost having him work through some of these thoughts for the first time, it felt like, talking about his work as a genealogist and thinking about the survival of his ancestors. But at the same time, no matter how extreme it is, I still identified with him and I hope that the audience identifies with him in a way, just because of how honest and realistic he was. He’s just so matter-of-fact about it. He’s talking about it as if it were a very simple thing that happened.