Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, young directors who go by the joint film credit Daniels, are known for reality-warped miniatures—short films, music videos, commercials—that are eerie yet playful in mood. In their work, people jump into other people’s bodies, Teddy bears dance to hard-core dubstep, rednecks shoot clothes from rifles onto fleeing nudists. Last year, their first feature-length project, “Swiss Army Man”—starring Daniel Radcliffe, who plays a flatulent talking corpse that befriends a castaway—premièred at Sundance, and left some viewers wondering if it was the strangest thing ever to be screened at the festival. The Times, deciding that the film was impossible to categorize, called it “weird and wonderful, disgusting and demented.”

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that when the Daniels were notified by their production company, several years ago, that an Israeli indie pop star living in New York wanted to hire them to experiment with technology that could alter fundamental assumptions of moviemaking, they took the call.

The musician was Yoni Bloch, arguably the first Internet sensation on Israel’s music scene—a wispy, bespectacled songwriter from the Negev whose wry, angst-laden music went viral in the early aughts, leading to sold-out venues and a record deal. After breaking up with his girlfriend, in 2007, Bloch had hoped to win her back by thinking big. He made a melancholy concept album about their relationship, along with a companion film in the mode of “The Wall”—only to fall in love with the actress who played his ex. He had also thought up a more ambitious idea: an interactive song that listeners could shape as it played. But by the time he got around to writing it his hurt feelings had given way to more indeterminate sentiments, and the idea grew to become an interactive music video. The result, “I Can’t Be Sad Anymore,” which he and his band released online in 2010, opens with Bloch at a party in a Tel Aviv apartment. Standing on a balcony, he puts on headphones, then wanders among his friends, singing about his readiness to escape melancholy. He passes the headphones to others; whoever wears them sings, too. Viewers decide, by clicking on onscreen prompts, how the headphones are passed—altering, in real time, the song’s vocals, orchestration, and emotional tone, while also following different micro-dramas. If you choose the drunk, the camera follows her as she races into the bathroom, to Bloch’s words “I want to drink less / but be more drunk.” Choose her friend instead, and the video leads to sports fans downing shots, with the lyrics “I want to work less / but for a greater cause.”

Bloch came to believe that there was commercial potential in the song’s underlying technology—software that he and his friends had developed during a few intense coding marathons. (Bloch had learned to write programs at an early age, starting on a Commodore 64.) He put his music career on hold, raised millions of dollars in venture capital, and moved to New York. Bloch called his software Treehouse and his company Interlude—the name hinting at a cultural gap between video games and movies which he sought to bridge. What he was selling was “a new medium,” he took to saying. Yet barely anyone knew of it. Treehouse was technology in need of an auteur, which is why Bloch reached out to the Daniels—encouraging them to use the software as they liked. “It was like handing off a new type of camera and saying, ‘Now, use this and do something amazing,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘I don’t want to tell you what to do.’ ”

Bloch was offering for film an idea that has long existed in literature. In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about a learned Chinese governor who retreated from civilization to write an enormous, mysterious novel called “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In Borges’s telling, the novel remained a riddle—chaotic, fragmentary, impenetrable—for more than a century, until a British Sinologist deciphered it: the book, he discovered, sought to explore every possible decision that its characters could make, every narrative bifurcation, every parallel time line. By chronicling all possible worlds, the author was striving to create a complete model of the universe as he understood it. Borges apparently recognized that a philosophical meditation on bifurcating narratives could make for more rewarding reading than the actual thing. “The Garden of Forking Paths,” if it truly explored every possible story line, would have been a novel without any direction—a paradox, in that it would hardly say more than a blank page.

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Daniel Kwan told me that while he was in elementary school, in the nineteen-nineties, he often returned from the public library with stacks of Choose Your Own Adventure novels—slim volumes, written in the second person, that allow readers to decide at key moments how the story will proceed. (“If you jump down on the woolly mammoth, turn to page 29. If you continue on foot, turn to page 30.”) The books were the kind of thing you could find in a child’s backpack alongside Garbage Pail Kids cards and Matchbox cars. For a brief time, they could offer up a kind of Borgesian magic, but the writing was schlocky, the plot twists jarring, the endings inconsequential. As literature, the books never amounted to anything; the point was that they could be played. “Choose Your Own Adventure was great,” Kwan told me. “But even as a kid I was, like, there is something very unsatisfying about these stories.”

Early experiments in interactive film were likewise marred by shtick. In 1995, a company called Interfilm collaborated with Sony to produce “Mr. Payback,” based on a script by Bob Gale, who had worked on the “Back to the Future” trilogy. In the movie, a cyborg meted out punishment to baddies while the audience, voting with handheld controllers, chose the act of revenge. The film was released in forty-four theatres. Critics hated it. “The basic problem I had with the choices on the screen with ‘Mr. Payback’ is that they didn’t have one called ‘None of the above,’ ” Roger Ebert said, declaring the movie the worst of the year. “We don’t want to interact with a movie. We want it to act on us. That’s why we go, so we can lose ourselves in the experience.”

Gene Siskel cut in: “Do it out in the lobby—play the video game. Don’t try to mix the two of them together. It’s not going to work!”

Siskel and Ebert might have been willfully severe. But they had identified a cognitive clash that—as the Daniels also suspected—any experiment with the form would have to navigate. Immersion in a narrative, far from being passive, requires energetic participation; while watching movies, viewers must continually process new details—keeping track of all that has happened and forecasting what might plausibly happen. Good stories, whether dramas or action films, tend to evoke emotional responses, including empathy and other forms of social cognition. Conversely, making choices in a video game often produces emotional withdrawal: players are either acquiring skills or using them reflexively to achieve discrete rewards. While narratives help us to make sense of the world, skills help us to act within it.

As the Daniels discussed Bloch’s offer, they wondered if some of these problems were insurmountable, but the more they talked about them, the more they felt compelled to take on the project. “We tend to dive head first into things we initially want to reject,” Kwan said. “Interactive filmmaking—it’s like this weird thing where you are giving up control of a tight narrative, which is kind of the opposite of what most filmmakers want. Because the viewer can’t commit to one thing, it can be a frustrating experience. And yet we as human beings are fascinated by stories that we can shape, because that’s what life is like—life is a frustrating thing where we can’t commit to anything. So we were, like, O.K., what if we took a crack at it? No one was touching it. What would happen if we did?”