S5 EP4: John Wilson on collaborating with Nathan Fielder, confronting a cult, and hating mockumentaries
The Louis Theroux Podcast
Spotify Studios
4.1 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2025
⏱️ 79 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Microphone check. Chickadee check, chickity check, microphone check. |
| 0:09.5 | Hello, Louis Theroux here. Welcome to my podcast, which I like to call the Louis Theroux podcast. |
| 0:24.2 | My guest this episode is documentary maker John Wilson, |
| 0:31.0 | best known for his Emmy-nominated series How To with John Wilson on HBO and also on BBC I player. |
| 0:35.2 | It is a, well, it's hard to describe when we talk about it in the chat, |
| 0:37.7 | but basically a first-person documentary series in which John, he's always behind the camera doing the filming, but he goes on adventures |
| 0:43.2 | around New York, drilling into random encounters. A lot of it is made up of imagery grabbed |
| 0:49.8 | on the streets of New York, painstakingly spliced together, this very fast cuts of seagulls pecking at bins |
| 0:56.5 | and then random people doing strange things in the streets. |
| 1:00.6 | A bit like a kind of, the photographer Ouija, he collects surreal juxtapositions of daily life. |
| 1:05.8 | And then in the course of it goes on an adventure by meeting someone and being sort of sucked into a |
| 1:11.1 | kind of, I don't know, like a strange, digressive journey into a subculture or a hobby of some |
| 1:20.1 | kind. And it's exec by Nathan Fielder, who you may know from Nathan for you and the |
| 1:27.4 | rehearsal. |
| 1:28.9 | We talk about him. |
| 1:30.5 | I first became aware of John, I think partly because of the Nathan Fielder connection, |
| 1:35.5 | I'd interviewed Nathan for a magazine, and then he put John on my radar, |
| 1:39.9 | and then it being on the eye player, I watched it. |
| 1:42.5 | And there's been many comparisons made between my documentaries and John's. |
| 1:47.5 | There's interesting overlap, also significant differences. |
| 1:51.6 | And then it turned out, John had seen my programs and was a fan. |
| 1:56.1 | So it made perfect sense that we should meet up. |
... |
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