For over 50 years, Brian Eno has been at the forefront of musical creativity, technology, and artistic innovation. As a producer, he has helped define and reinvent the sound of some of the most important artists in music, including David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, Coldplay and dozens of others. Undeniably, Eno has changed the way modern music is made. Film critic and academic talks to the great man himself about Gary Hustwit’s generative AI doc Eno, shortlisted for the Feature Documentary Oscar.
After Eno expressed his delight at finally being able to thank somebody called Elvis, he explained how Hustwit’s film came into being, specifically reacting to his interviewer’s supposition that this was the kind of project that the musician would shy away from.
“Well, I had worked with Gary before. He made a film about the German designer Dieter Rams, and he asked me if I would do music for that,” Eno responds. “So I knew something about Gary’s style of working and I also knew him as a person. So he suggested to me while we were working on the Rams documentary that he make a sort of biographical film about me. And my first reaction was, I really don’t like biographical films very much, especially about artists because they always sort of have this very kind of romantic image of the artist as this wildly different person with a head full of oceanically large ideas. And I don’t really know many artists like that, and I’m certainly not one of them. I’m pretty much like most other people I think, in my normal life.
“And the other thing I didn’t like about most documentaries is the fact that because they’re a single film, they give a single sequence of events – and your own memory doesn’t even do that. Your own memory of your life is constantly shuffling things around and changing the relative value of things and connecting things together that you didn’t connect before, and so on and so on. So this is when Gary said, well, I was thinking of making it a little bit like your music is made, so it’s constantly recombining in different ways. And I thought, okay, that sounds like a really good idea.”
To hear the whole interview, click on the link above.
