This movie changes every time you watch it - Gary Hustwit

You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host Elise Hu. Film generally seems like a fixed medium. The scenes are shot, the edit is made, and the final version is just that, the final version. But in this talk, filmmaker Gary Hustwit challenges the idea that a movie must tell just one story, one story only. He shares how he made the documentary "Eno", about the musician and composer Brian Eno, and how it's possible that this film never ends the same way twice.

欢迎收听TED每日播客，我们每天为你带来新观点，激发你的好奇心。我是主持人伊莉丝·胡。电影通常看起来是一种固定的媒介。场景被拍摄，剪辑被完成，最终版本就是那样，最终版。但在这次演讲中，电影制作人加里·赫斯维特挑战了电影必须只讲述一个故事的观点。他分享了如何制作关于音乐家兼作曲家布莱恩·伊诺的纪录片《Eno》，以及这部电影如何可能永远不会以相同的方式结束两次。

Hey everyone. Hi, I'm an independent filmmaker, and for the past 20 years I've been making documentaries about design, art and music. But they're really about people. And over the years, I started to question the limitations of documentary filmmaking, because human beings are multidimensional; there's never just one story about any of us. The documentary film is, by its nature, reductive; any documentary you've ever seen is just a tiny sliver of the actual story.

大家好。嗨，我是一名独立电影制作人，过去20年来我一直在制作关于设计、艺术和音乐的纪录片。但它们本质上都是关于人的。这些年来，我开始质疑纪录片制作的局限性，因为人是多维度的；关于我们任何一个人，都绝不止一个故事。纪录片本质上就是简化的；你看过的任何一部纪录片都只是真实故事的一个微小片段。

But what if a film could tell more than one story? Or what if one film could tell thousands of stories about its subject? How could we envision documentaries so that they were as multifaceted as human beings are?

但如果一部电影能讲述不止一个故事呢？或者，如果一部电影能讲述关于其主题的成千上万个故事呢？我们如何才能构想出像人一样多面的纪录片？

Well, that's what my team and I have been working on, and last year we released a film called "Eno". It's a documentary about the musician and artist Brian Eno that changes every time it's shown. It's the world's first generative feature film, and there are billions of possible variations of it. It's always a story about Brian Eno. It's just a different story every time you watch it.

嗯，这就是我和我的团队一直在努力的方向，去年我们发行了一部名为《Eno》的电影。这是一部关于音乐家兼艺术家布莱恩·伊诺的纪录片，每次放映时都会改变。它是世界上第一部生成式故事片，有数十亿种可能的变化版本。它始终是关于布莱恩·伊诺的故事。只是每次你看的时候，都是不同的故事。

So you probably have some questions like, how does the film change? Why does the film change? How do I talk to my friend about a movie if they've seen a totally different version of it? Or why are you doing this to us, Gary? We like our movies the way they are.

所以你可能会有一些问题，比如，电影怎么变化？为什么电影要变化？如果朋友看的是完全不同的版本，我怎么和他讨论这部电影？或者，加里，你为什么要对我们这样做？我们就喜欢电影原来的样子。

Yes, we all love movies. We've watched hundreds of them in our lifetime. Thousands probably. And we have our favorites. But there's one thing that all of these movies have in common. They are all linear, fixed experiences. There's a beginning and an end, and they're the same every time we watch them.

是的，我们都爱电影。我们一生中看过几百部。可能上千部。我们都有自己最爱的电影。但所有这些电影都有一个共同点。它们都是线性的、固定的体验。有开头和结尾，而且每次我们观看时它们都是一样的。

But have you ever wondered why? Like, why do films have to be the same every time? The reason is actually a technical constraint from 130 years ago, when cinema was born and film was a physical medium, a reel of celluloid images that had to scroll through cameras and projectors, and they had to make duplicate copies of those reels and send them out to theaters.

但你有没有想过为什么？比如，为什么电影每次都必须一样？原因实际上可以追溯到130年前的一个技术限制，那时电影诞生，胶片是一种物理介质，一卷卷赛璐珞影像必须通过摄像机和放映机滚动播放，而且他们必须复制这些胶片卷并发送到各个影院。

But 25 or 30 years ago, when filmmaking all went digital, suddenly this constraint of physicality is gone. But we've continued to make movies kind of in the same way we always have. It's like we're playing by a rulebook that doesn't exist anymore. So in 2019 I reached out to Brendan Dawes, who is a digital artist in England, and we started experimenting.

但25或30年前，当电影制作全部数字化时，这种物理性的约束突然消失了。然而我们基本上还是以一贯的方式继续制作电影。就好像我们还在遵循一本已不存在的规则手册。于是在2019年，我联系了英国的数码艺术家布兰登·道斯，我们开始进行实验。

We wanted to see if we could make a cinematic documentary that was created dynamically in software with real footage that could tell a different story each time.

我们想看看是否能制作一部电影式纪录片，在软件中动态生成，使用真实的影像片段，每次都能讲述一个不同的故事。

We built a generative video platform that was entirely human coded. It wasn't an AI model based or trained on other people's work. And as we were experimenting we realized like who the ideal subject would be for the first generative film and then we reached out to this guy.

我们构建了一个完全由人工编码的生成式视频平台。它不是基于或训练于他人作品的AI模型。在实验过程中，我们意识到谁是第一部生成式电影的理想主题，然后我们联系了这个人。

Can you tell us your full name? Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno. Well ah. We'll just use his shortened form, his name for this, for this talk. So Brian for the past 50 years has been pushing the boundaries of creativity and technology, from his electronic music experiments and Roxy Music to his collaborations with David Bowie on records like "Heroes" to producing Talking Heads, U2, Laurie Anderson, Grace Jones, so many others and he's released over 40 solo and collaboration records.

你能告诉我们你的全名吗？布莱恩·彼得·乔治·圣约翰·勒巴蒂斯特·德·拉·萨尔·伊诺。好吧，嗯。我们就用他的简称，他的名字，为了这次演讲。布莱恩在过去50年里一直在推动创造力和技术的边界，从他的电子音乐实验和"洛克西音乐团"，到与大卫·鲍伊在《Heroes》等唱片上的合作，再到制作"传声头像"乐队、U2乐队、劳里·安德森、格蕾丝·琼斯等许多其他艺人，他发行了超过40张个人及合作唱片。

And in the 1990s, long before generative AI, Brian was making software to create generative music. He likened it to planting the seeds for a piece of music and then letting that piece of music flower in thousands of different ways over the course of time. It was like the music was a living thing.

而在20世纪90年代，远在生成式AI出现之前，布莱恩就在制作软件来创造生成式音乐。他将其比作为一首音乐播下种子，然后让这首音乐随着时间的推移，以成千上万种不同的方式绽放。就好像音乐是有生命的东西。

Now, I'd actually approached Brian several years before this about doing a normal documentary. And he turned me down and he turned down a lot of filmmakers. But his reason was really fascinating. He said he hated biographical documentaries because it was always one person's version of another person's story. And there was never just one story about anyone. But Brendan and I thought we had a solution to this, and we showed him an early demo of our generative film software, and he was really exc*ted.

实际上，我在这之前几年就曾接触过布莱恩，想做一个普通的纪录片。他拒绝了我，也拒绝了很多电影制作人。但他的理由真的很有趣。他说他讨厌传记纪录片，因为它总是一个人讲述的另一个人的故事版本。而关于任何人，都绝不止一个故事。但布兰登和我认为我们有一个解决方案，我们给他看了我们生成式电影软件的早期演示，他非常兴奋。

I still don't think he wanted to have a movie made about him, but he wanted to be part of this generative film experiment, and that was the price that he had to pay.

我仍然不认为他想要一部关于他自己的电影，但他想成为这个生成式电影实验的一部分，而这就是他必须付出的代价。

Brian gave us access to hundreds of hours of archival footage on every obsolete videotape format imaginable. It took us two years just to digitize and catalog all this stuff, but we needed more than just archival footage to tell this story. So I filmed another 50 hours with Brian talking about his creative process. In the end, we had over 500 hours of material for this generative software platform, and I'll show you how that how that works.

布莱恩让我们接触了数百小时的档案影像，涵盖了你能想到的所有过时的录像带格式。光是将所有这些资料数字化和编目就花了我们两年时间，但我们需要的不只是档案影像来讲述这个故事。所以我又拍摄了50个小时布莱恩谈论他创作过程的素材。最终，我们为这个生成式软件平台准备了超过500小时的素材，我会给你们展示它是如何运作的。

We start off with a data set of edited scenes, raw footage and music, and the system selects pieces from that material and builds them into a film that's probably 85 to 90 minutes long. Now the system knows what all the contents of these pieces are, and it knows how to arrange them into a good story flow. It also creates transitions between the scenes dynamically in real time.

我们从一组编辑过的场景、原始影像片段和音乐的数据集开始，系统从这些素材中选择片段，并将它们构建成一部大约85到90分钟长的电影。系统知道所有这些片段的内容是什么，也知道如何将它们排列成一个良好的故事流。它还会实时动态地创建场景之间的过渡。

The biggest challenge for us was how to make it so that every version of the film had an engaging story arc, regardless of what individual pieces kind of were in it. Filmmakers are notoriously control freaks. But I still have control, but it's on this higher level, like I'm curating all the different little pieces that could go into this system. And I'm also designing the limitless ways that they can interact.

我们面临的最大挑战是如何确保电影的每个版本都有一个引人入胜的故事弧线，不管里面具体包含了哪些片段。电影制作人众所周知是控制狂。但我仍然拥有控制权，只是是在更高的层面上，就像我在策划所有可能进入这个系统的各种小片段。同时，我也在设计它们可以无限交互的方式。

So I don't have control over the contents of each individual film, but it doesn't matter because it always works. We've designed it that way, and I get to be surprised by my own film every time I watch it, which is crazy and so liberating.

所以，我无法控制每一部具体影片的内容，但这没关系，因为它总是能行。我们就是这样设计的，每次观看我自己的电影时我都会感到惊讶，这很疯狂，也非常令人解放。

If you have 500 hours of footage and you've got to get down to a 90 minute film, that's the cutting room floor thing. Normally in a film, you'd have to get rid of all that other footage and get it down to that time thing. Killing your darlings is what they say, but in this approach there is no cutting room floor. I can put as much material in and it will come up in different versions of the film in different ways.

如果你有500小时的素材，而你需要剪成一部90分钟的电影，那就是剪辑室废片的问题。通常在一部电影中，你必须舍弃所有其他素材，压缩到那个时长。他们说要"杀死你的宠儿"，但在这种方法中，没有剪辑室废片。我可以放入尽可能多的材料，它们会以不同的方式出现在电影的不同版本中。

So it's not like a "choose your own adventure". Well, actually it's more like the adventure choosing you. But, um, another thing that we really, that we built in that's really cool is that we had in any iteration of the film and everyone either ah Laurie Anderson or David Byrne will appear and choose one of Brian's ah. They're called Oblique Strategies cards.

所以它不像那种"选择你自己的冒险"。嗯，实际上更像是冒险选择了你。但是，嗯，我们构建的另一个非常酷的功能是，在电影的任何一个迭代中，劳里·安德森或大卫·伯恩会出现，并选择布莱恩的一张…它们叫做"间接策略"卡。

These are like random prompts. If you're in a creative bind, you can read them. So there's dozens of them. And depending on which one comes up in the film, it will divert the movie or react in some way. So I'll show you how that works.

这些就像是随机的提示。如果你在创作中遇到瓶颈，你可以读读它们。总共有几十张。根据电影中出现哪一张，它会转移电影的走向或以某种方式做出反应。我来给你们展示一下这是如何运作的。

At this point in the talk, Gary pauses to show what he means. There's a large screen behind him, and on the screen to Gary's left, composer Laurie Anderson pops up and reads a card: "Retrace your steps." That shot is followed by images of Eno walking backwards on the screen behind Gary, showing a different iteration.

演讲至此，加里停下来展示他的意思。他身后有一个大屏幕，在加里左边的屏幕上，作曲家劳里·安德森出现并读出一张卡片："重走你的脚步。"这个镜头之后，是伊诺在加里身后屏幕上倒退行走的画面，展示了一个不同的迭代。

Musician David Byrne picks up a card and reads "Turn it upside down," followed by different footage and on the screen to Gary's right, we see Laurie Anderson again, and this time she reads "Gardening. Non-architecture" followed again by footage we haven't seen before.

音乐家大卫·伯恩拿起一张卡片，读出"把它倒过来"，接着是不同的影像片段，在加里右边的屏幕上，我们又看到劳里·安德森，这次她读的是"园艺。非建筑"，接着又是我们以前没见过的影像片段。

So this is, um, Catinus? That's a family of plants that I like a lot. In fact, in this garden, we have a lot of Catinus, a lot of Dogwood.

所以这是，嗯，丝穗木属？这是我很喜欢的一个植物科属。事实上，在这个花园里，我们有很多丝穗木，很多山茱萸。

There are many more cards and many more directions that they can push the film. We've premiered the film at the Sundance Film Festival, and we've shown it in hundreds of cinemas around the world since then. And every time it's been a different version and each audience that's seen it was seeing a film that was made for them that no other audience in the world will see.

还有更多的卡片和更多的方向可以推动电影的发展。我们在圣丹斯电影节上首映了这部电影，此后在世界各地数百家影院放映。每次都是不同的版本，每个观看它的观众看到的都是一部为他们制作的电影，世界上没有其他观众会看到。

People have come back three, four or ten, twenty times or more to see different versions, and every time they're getting another layer of Brian's story. Then they talk to their friends and they're like comparing versions. "Did you see the David Bowie scene?" "No, I didn't see it," so it's a totally new way to watch movies.

人们会回来三、四次，甚至十次、二十次或更多，为了看不同的版本，每次他们都能了解到布莱恩故事的另一个层面。然后他们会和朋友交谈，就像在比较版本。"你看到大卫·鲍伊的场景了吗？""没有，我没看到。"所以这是一种全新的观影方式。

Oh, the film was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. I buried the lead. Yeah, I buried the lead. I buried the lead, but the question was what was actually being nominated? Like which version of the billions of different versions of the film? And all of them? Like, nobody really knew. But, um, these are questions that the film industry in Hollywood will have to answer soon.

哦，这部电影入围了奥斯卡最佳纪录片奖的候选名单。我把最重要的事说晚了。是的，我把最重要的事说晚了。说晚了，但问题是，实际上被提名的是什么？是那数十亿个不同版本中的哪一个版本？还是所有版本？比如，没人真正知道。但是，嗯，这些都是好莱坞电影业很快必须回答的问题。

Now we're developing streaming software so we can stream generative films like this, and we're also collaborating with other filmmakers to bring this technology into their films. And there are so many creative possibilities as we scale this idea up. Like, what about a Marvel film, where it's different in every theater and fans can go see multiple versions and piece together the story puzzle?

现在我们正在开发流媒体软件，以便我们能像这样流式传输生成式电影，同时我们也与其他电影制作人合作，将这项技术引入他们的电影。随着我们将这个想法推广开来，有太多的创作可能性。比如，一部漫威电影会怎样？它在每个影院都不同，粉丝们可以去看多个版本，拼凑出故事谜题。

Um, we can also remix existing films with the software. For the past few months, we've been playing with a generative version of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive", which is crazy. It just re-edits itself over and over again. Or it could just play forever and never repeat.

嗯，我们也可以用这个软件重新混剪现有的电影。过去几个月，我们一直在把玩大卫·林奇的《穆赫兰道》的生成式版本，这很疯狂。它只是一遍又一遍地重新编辑自己。或者它可以永远播放下去，永不重复。

Just to be clear, this approach, I'm not saying it's a replacement for, you know, normal movies, but it's a different path. And I think it's so important for us to keep questioning these legacy models. Just because something is one way for a long time doesn't mean it's the only way or the best way.

需要明确的是，这种方法，我并不是说它是普通电影的替代品，但它是一条不同的道路。我认为，持续质疑这些遗留模式对我们来说非常重要。仅仅因为某事长期以来是一种方式，并不意味着它是唯一的方式或最好的方式。

As filmmakers, we've never had to ask the question of, like, how would my film change if it could change because we didn't have the technical capability to even do it. So now that we have that, the fun part is thinking about all the new storytelling possibilities and all the cinematic languages that this can unlock.

作为电影制作人，我们从来不需要问这样的问题，比如：如果我的电影可以改变，它会怎么变？因为我们甚至没有技术能力去做。所以现在我们有了这个能力，有趣的部分就是思考所有新的叙事可能性和所有可以被解锁的电影语言。

When you create something, we're doing this thing that humans are very good at, which is imagining. We really need to be able to harness the intelligence and creativity of everybody. Actually, art is the way we do that. I think that's a real hope for the future.

当你创造某物时，我们正在做人类非常擅长的事情，那就是想象。我们确实需要能够利用每个人的智慧和创造力。实际上，艺术就是我们实现这一点的方式。我认为这才是未来真正的希望。

Is it finished? We'll never be finished reinventing the way we tell stories as human beings. But this talk is finished. Thank you so much, everyone.

结束了吗？作为人类，我们永远不会停止重新发明讲故事的方式。但这次演讲结束了。非常感谢大家。

That was Gary Hustwit at TED 2025.

以上是加里·赫斯维特在TED 2025的演讲。