Gary Hustwit’s documentary “Eno” includes an old clip of an admiringly bemused David Bowie. He says of the film’s subject, the producer of Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy” albums, “I’m not quite sure what Brian does.” He wasn’t alone in thinking that way.
For more than half a century, Brian Eno, 76, has been a shape shifter: not just in music, but visual art, writing, even technology. Music remains his primary claim to fame: as a member of Roxy Music; with his own solo albums, one of which, “Music for Airports” (1978), gave birth to the ambient genre; and producing landmark records for Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2.
Actually, that Bowie clip may or may not appear in either of the two screenings of ”Eno” that the Institute of Contemporary Art will be presenting Friday night. The documentary is a shape shifter, too. Hustwit, 59, uses generative software created by him and several colleagues that makes every showing unique. Hustwit will be on hand, creating each version.
Both screenings are sold out.
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Hustwit is noted for his visually pristine and intellectually probing design documentaries, from “Helvetica” (2007), about the font, to “Rams” (2018), about the industrial designer Dieter Rams. A longtime Eno fan, Hustwit enlisted him to do the “Rams” musical score. That connection led to “Eno.”
Earlier this month, Hustwit spoke by Zoom about the film, its subject, and generative filmmaking.
Q. When was it that you proposed to Eno doing a film?
A. This is like 2017, and he said no. He told me that he hated bio documentaries and most music documentaries because it was always one person’s version of this other person’s story, and that he didn’t want to be anyone’s story. He had had many, many approaches over the years but had turned them all down.
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A few years later, in 2019, I’d been having these ideas about generative film and experimenting with dynamically created films, using raw material from “Rams” for those experiments. After about six months of that, I showed Brian. He was just blown away and agreed to do the project. It’s so much like what he’d been doing with music and visual art over the past decades. That’s what he was excited about.
Q. When I read about the concept of generative filmmaking I found myself thinking of aleatory composition in music.
A. You can call this aleatoric cinema in the sense that there is an element of chance and randomness in what it is. But it’s also structured randomness in some ways. I wasn’t trying to make a random assemblage of experimental scenes. I wanted it to have a kind of traditional cinematic documentary structure and have the sense of a beginning, a middle, and an end. I just wanted it to have the ability to change.
What we think of as the length of a narrative arc is all relative. I could make a 40-minute version or a four-hour version of “Eno,” or a 168-hour one. So it’s all about context. And I think in the context of an audience coming to a theater and watching something 90-minute-ish (because, you know, the film’s a different length every time it screens) that I still wanted it to play like a cinematic documentary.
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Q. Just to be absolutely clear, neither of the screenings Friday will be the same.
A. No, each will be different. It will also be the only time those two versions will ever be seen. I’ll actually be creating it in real time, as we’re watching, which is super fun.
Q. You said that there could be a 168-hour version. The archival footage is just so interesting.
A. Yeah.
Q. In strictly practical terms, how difficult was it to pick and choose and reduce?
A. It was a a huge part of this process. It took us two years just to go through Brian’s video archive and to transfer all that stuff and restore and catalog it. So it’s as much filmmaking in the traditional sense of editing and storytelling and craft. You can’t just throw a bunch of random footage into our software system. You still have to have people that can tell stories cinematically and know how all this different material can fit together, that connect all these ideas and all these eras, and all this music and all these bands that he’s worked with.
Q. He’s a shape shifter.
A. Totally. And again, the only reason that he agreed to do the film was that’s its form also. I can’t think of a better marriage of form and content than with this project. I mean, I always try to approach a documentary with the content in mind. I want that to inform the structure and the form. But in this case it works on so many different levels. And I’m still kind of blown away by the way it all came together.
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Q. Eno’s very charming. He has great screen presence.
A. He’s hilarious. I never thought of Brian Eno as being funny. But he’s like that all the time. I mean, he’s very self-deprecating, and, you know, it’s part of his approach. It’s like the way he worked with Bowie. It was all games, and, you know, jokes. I think that sense of play and experimentation is what has enabled him to have such a long career in so many different media.
Q. What’s next?
A. I’m really interested in this idea of generative film and in the creative possibilities around it. The biggest thing that has excited me about “Eno” is that it makes going to the cinema feel like an event, because you know that you’re the only audience in the world that’s ever going to see this version of the film. There’s something really special about that.
Interview was edited and condensed.
ENO
Institute of Contemporary Art, Sept. 20 at 6 and 9 p.m. 617-478-3100, www.icaboston.org/events/eno
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.