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.