I reshot Andy Warhol

It’s one thing to make the most boring film in cinema history — at least you can kid yourself at the outset that it might turn out differently. It’s quite another to lovingly recreate the same film half a century later, shot by eye-bleeding shot, but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, I’m proud to say. I say shot by shot, but since Andy Warhol’s Empire consists of a single locked-off shot of the Empire State Building running to 8 hours 5 minutes in black-and-white yawn-o-vision, that’s not much to write home about. Nor is the rest of the movie, from almost any popcorn-munching perspective you can think of.

With the honourable exception of this magazine’s Deborah Ross, many film critics seem to be docile, calf-like creatures, happy to live in the dark and be fed the same thing over and over again. But even they were stirred from their torpor by Empire, which regularly leaves a crowded field behind in cinéastes’ polls of the dullest films ever committed to celluloid.

On an autumn evening in 1964, Warhol and half a dozen cronies entered the Time-Life Building in Manhattan after working hours. They ascended to an office on the 41st floor with an uninterrupted view of the titular skyscraper. They set up Warhol’s new Auricon camera on a tripod and, apart from changing the rolls of film every 35 minutes or so, that was more or less that.

On its release, Empire enjoyed the proverbial mixed reviews. Some people booed and asked for their money back. An Austrian audience sat through the whole picture with iron self-will. It emerged later that a Viennese newspaper had offered a cash prize to anyone who could stick it out.

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So why go to the trouble of filming the wretched thing all over again? Well, director David Shulman and I have been trying to recreate 24 hours in Warhol’s life in the mid-1960s, and wanted some footage of the Empire State Building, though nothing like as much as he did.