New Brian Eno doco changes at every screening due to generative software

For over 50 years, Brian Eno has been on the cutting edge of music, art and technology.

To document his unconventional and relentlessly creative journey, filmmaker Gary Hustwit had to come up with an idea as ground-breaking as Eno himself.

Thanks to new generative software, his new documentary Eno appears as a different version at every screening.

"There can be billions of potential versions of the film but you'll learn a different kind of set of ideas about Brian every time you watch it," Hustwit told Music 101.

Although he's been a fan of Eno's music for years, Hustwit said it was the British musician and producer's highly original approach to creativity that he really wanted to capture in Eno.

"He's been able to spend the past 50-plus years exploring exactly the directions that he wants to in music and recording and visual art and in technology.

"That was my main goal, to kind of dig into Brian's brain and figure out or decode how he does what he does."

After hours spent interviewing Eno, Hustwit said his endless curiosity was what stood out.

"At 76 years old, he's just still so interested in technology and in culture and in the world around him. And that's really infectious."

Although wary of being the subject of a documentary, Eno has always been up for experimentation, Hustwit said, and agreed to be part of it after being "blown away" by early demos.

"He still doesn't want to have a documentary about him made but he wanted to be part of the first generative feature film and part of this experiment. The price he had to pay was that it had to be about himself."

Eno was hyper-intelligent and extremely well-read, said Hustwit.

"I'll be honest, I've interviewed hundreds of designers and architects and artists, but I think these were the most intimidating conversations that I had.

"Brian's intellectual gymnastics are bouncing through centuries and different schools of thought so to try to follow that was hard."

He was also really funny, though, Hustwit said.

"That's something that I think people don't really associate with him … When you see the film you'll understand what I mean."

Helpfully, Eno's archive of over 500 hours of video footage was very, very well organised and has been well taken care of over the decades, Hustwit said.

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

Amongst Eno's collection was raw footage of himself naked in a giant salad for a previously unreleased music video.

The song Stiff, which was recorded in 1991, appeared on the Eno soundtrack and Eno's team recently finished and released the video.

Capturing how Eno has contextualised his creative work over the decades was one of the most exciting things about making Eno, Hustwit said.

"Brian's been thinking about these questions - why do we like music and why do we need art in our lives? He's evolved his thinking on this for 50-plus years and talks a lot about his ideas around the subjects in the film."

Eno has seen the doco twice, he said, and enjoyed how its storytelling format worked in a similar way to how our memories work.

"We don't remember stories in perfect chronological order and we change that order around sometimes and at different parts in our life. Certain memories are more important or less important than others and that changes. And we're always sort of rewriting the stories we tell about ourselves."

Although Hustwit said he could make a really, really great director's cut of Eno - "you know, put all the Bowie scenes in one version" - he said that would defeat the point of the film's format.

"What I was trying to do was make a new capability that filmmakers have never had before, and to use that technology on our own material.

"There could be a Marvel movie that's different every time we watch it or is different in different times of the day or different places parts of the world.

"If [Oscar-winning director] Christopher Nolan said that his next film was going to be different every time it's screened, it would completely change filmmaking and change cinema."

Eno is screening at all of the NZIFF film festivals around the country.