Brian Eno’s New Documentary Changes at Every Showing Because of Generative Software

For over 50 years, Brian Eno has been a pioneer in music, art and technology.

To document his unconventional and endlessly creative journey, filmmaker Gary Hustwit had to come up with an idea as groundbreaking as Eno himself.

Thanks to new generative software, his new documentary Eno At each show it appears in a different version.

“There could be a billion potential versions of the movie, but every time you watch it, you’ll come away with a different set of ideas about Brian,” Hustwit said. Music 101.

Although he has been a fan of Eno’s music for years, Hustwit said he wanted to capture the British musician and producer’s wildly original approach to creativity on his album. Eno.

“For the past 50-plus years, he has been able to explore exactly where he wanted to go in music, recording, visual art and technology.

“That was my main goal, to kind of get inside Brian’s brain and figure out or decipher how he does what he does.”

After spending hours interviewing Eno, Hustwit said that what stood out to him was his boundless curiosity.

“At 76, he is still so interested in technology, culture and the world around him. And that is truly contagious.”

Hustwit said that despite his fears of being the subject of a documentary, Eno was always open to experimentation and agreed to take part after being “blown away” by his initial demos.

“He still doesn’t want a documentary made about him, but he wanted to be part of the first generative fiction film and part of that experiment. The price he had to pay was that it had to be about him.”

According to Hustwit, Eno was extremely intelligent and well-read.

“I’ll be honest, I’ve interviewed hundreds of designers, architects, and artists, but I think these were the most difficult conversations I’ve ever had.

“Brian’s intellectual gymnastics leap across centuries and different schools of thought, so it was hard to keep up.”

But he was also really funny, Hustwit said.

“I don’t think people associate that with him… When you watch the movie, you’ll understand what I mean.”

Fortunately, Hustwit said, Eno’s archive, which numbers more than 500 hours of video footage, is very, very well organized and well preserved for decades.

Around 1980, while he was working with the Talking Heads and living in New York, Eno bought a video camera and began filming everything around him – his friends, his cats, people on the street, and sometimes just himself dancing.

Among Eno’s collection were raw footage of himself naked in a giant salad, used in a previously unreleased music video.

Song RigidRecorded in 1991, it was featured on the soundtrack of Eno’s film, and Eno’s band recently completed and released a music video.

Capturing the way Eno contextualized his work across the decades was one of the most exciting things about working on Eno, Hustwit says.

“Brian has been thinking about these questions—why do we like music and why do we need art in our lives? He’s been developing his thinking on these issues for over 50 years, and he talks a lot about his ideas about the themes that he explores in the film.”

Eno said he had seen the documentary twice and liked that its storytelling worked in a similar way to the way our memory works.

“We don’t remember stories in perfect chronological order, and sometimes we change that order at different points in our lives. Some memories are more important or less important than others, and that changes. And we’re always, in some way, rewriting the stories we tell about ourselves.”

Although Hustwit said he could make a really, really great director’s cut Eno – “you know, put all the Bowie scenes in one version” – he said it would defeat the purpose of the film’s format.

“I wanted to create a new opportunity that filmmakers have never had before and use that technology in our own material.

“A Marvel movie could be different every time we see it, or it could be different depending on the time of day or where we are in the world.

“If (Oscar-winning director) Christopher Nolan said his next film would be different every time it was shown, it would completely change filmmaking and cinema.”

Eno is screened at all NZIFF film festivals in the country.