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“The reaction from the film industry has been curiosity and excitement, but also confusion,” he said. “Everyone wants me to make a director’s cut. I could make a really good one, but that would be sort of antithetical to the whole exercise, for me to exert that level of control.”

Maybe the emotional payoff of a fixed narrative is too ingrained in audiences to be eliminated. It certainly hasn’t been easy for Hustwit to adapt “Eno”to the commercial conventions of streaming and DVDs.

“I like it when people make clear artistic decisions,” he said. “In a time of so-called A.I., personality becomes even more important.” Using technology to randomize content and narrative, he added with a laugh, “becomes a little bit garbage.”

I didn’t fancy the linearity of conventional biographies,” he said. “Lives don’t run in straight lines, and every time we think about them in retrospect (i.e., every time we start remembering) we actually rethink them. Our lives are stories we write and rewrite. There is no single reliable narrative of a life.”

“We can use technology as a structural tool to do interesting things with the narrative. This idea that a film has to be set in stone and always linear is obsolete, I think. There’s another possible path here for filmmaking going forward.”