Billie Eilish Lights Up the Big Screen

The pop powerhouse is taking her latest tour from the stage to the movie theater with James Cameron.

James Cameron knows a strong female lead when he sees one. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker spent decades making high-octane movies powered by the electric, resistant spirit of women—whether it was stone-cold Sigourney Weaver in 1986’s Aliens, Kate Winslet’s gutsy teen debutante in the 1997 blockbuster Titanic, or Zoe Saldaña’s cerulean warrior princess in the Avatar series. For his latest project, Cameron set his sights on a new, nonfictional kind of heroine: a ballsy androgyne pop star in basketball shorts.

Coming May 8 to theaters nationwide, Billie Eilish’s concert film Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), which she codirected with Cameron, sees her commanding the stage in Manchester, England, while on her latest run of shows in 2025. In the teaser trailer, confetti flies and neon shocks of light cut through Eilish’s silhouette as she leaps and bounds mischievously across the stage—a Marvel character in the flesh, shot entirely in 3D. Frenzied cries of girls rip across the airwaves as she leans back and unfurls an impish grin to the crowd, eliciting an even louder burst of screams.

On a visit to the Paramount Studios lot in Hollywood to meet the 10-time Grammy-winning singer, I spy her before she sees me. Wearing an oversize Smashing Pumpkins tee and sweats—along with a walled-off, un-fuck-with-able stare—she and her bodyguard are circling the lots outside as they take her gray pit bull, Shark, for his lunchtime walk. A little while later, we meet inside the invite-only movie theater, where her publicist hands each of us a pair of 3D glasses to watch the trailer. Afterward, as the surround sound bombast and the bright lights fade out, and the aquarium-blue lights come on above us, Eilish settles in to talk, sprawling across two of the seats, her legs hanging over the armrest. We’re only a few minutes into our conversation when around the corner, Shark takes a heaping dump on the carpet and then trots over to Eilish, taking what can only be described as a victory lap. “Bro! Shark! That’s bad behavior!” Eilish says, a little embarrassed. She shakes her head and ruffles Shark’s velveteen ears. “He’s so well-trained. He knows better, but he didn’t today!”

Eilish didn’t initially plan to shoot a concert film for this tour—much less one that follows her so closely behind the scenes as she hangs out with friends, does physical therapy, or cries in the greenroom. Her previous concert film, Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles, was directed by Robert Rodriguez and Patrick Osborne and featured animated elements, à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which added whimsy and made up for the fact that it was filmed in a vacant Hollywood Bowl at the height of the pandemic. Before that, director R. J. Cutler had closely documented her adolescence and the making of her sensational 2019 debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, for the film Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry.

“At first I was like, ‘I don’t want to do a documentary,’” she explains. “I shot a documentary when I was 15 to 18, just being filmed for three years straight.…I’m so private about my actual life now.”

But then Cameron came calling. Eilish got his pitch for the film from her mom, actor and activist Maggie Baird, who founded the L.A. nonprofit organization Support + Feed, which distributes plant-based meals to unhoused communities and others struggling with food insecurity while lowering the carbon footprint. “Usually, things go through the team and the managers,” Eilish says. “But it was literally my mom who told me, ‘Hey, James Cameron has been really obsessed with your show from afar.’”

Eilish is based in L.A., a hop, skip, and a jump from Hollywood—and from Highland Park, the northeastern neighborhood where she grew up. The 24-year-old was raised in a wildly creative family. Her parents, a carpenter and a teacher, also worked as part-time actors, and homeschooled Eilish and her older brother, the Grammy-winning producer and singer-songwriter Finneas O’Connell, shuttling the kids between various music, acting, and dance classes. Eilish tells me, though, that she’s just learned how filmmaking actually works. She’s spent the past few weeks with Cameron in his Manhattan Beach production studio, Lightstorm Earth, where they’ve been meticulously splicing concert footage with the goal of delivering an action-packed viewing experience. “We thought, ‘Why don’t we just film stuff backstage to have it?’ James was holding this enormous 3D camera this close to me,” she says, pinching her fingers in front of her nose. “He was the one interviewing me. He’s the one asking me questions. And then I thought, This really does add a lot!”

On the phone, Cameron says he knew of Eilish’s star power onstage. But when he sat in on her first performance in Manchester, he realized her potential as a filmmaker, too. “I came to admire and respect her drive as an artist,” Cameron tells me. “How she manifests her artistic goals, not just to create beautiful music, but also to be a great performer. She was really the architect and creative guiding force on her show. She had conceived it so she would be in the center of the audience and play to all four quadrants. It’s quite remarkable: She runs like a maniac from one end of the stage to the other, from side to side. She’s all over the place, and the way in which she engages with her audience at the show is phenomenal.” Watching her, he says, “It occurred to me that she and I should codirect this film.”

“I came to admire and respect her drive as an artist. How she manifests her artistic goals, not just to create beautiful music, but also to be a great performer.”—James Cameron

Finneas says he was tickled by Cameron’s presence at the shows. “I got to watch him watch the show, which was really impressive,” Finneas recalls of the show in Manchester. “He was watching, like, 16 monitors at the same time, wearing 3D goggles. And because of the way 3D works, he had to center his head in front of each monitor that he was looking at, so he was dancing and bobbing, moving around. He’s an incredibly fast, passionate, and hardworking dude.”

A superhuman work ethic is something both Cameron and Eilish share. Still, Eilish has said her past tours were arduous, imposing a physical toll on her body. She incurred a hip growth plate injury while practicing for a hip-hop dance competition as a teen, and later learned that she suffers from hypermobility, a connective tissue disorder that comes with bouts of chronic pain. Her last tour, in particular, came with a few injuries. She sprained her ankle in Manchester, on the night that Cameron first joined the crew to start shooting the concert film. Earlier in the tour, during an October 2024 stop at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, she tumbled down the stairs while exiting the stage and got a chunky bruise on her thigh. At a show in Miami, she fell when a man yanked her by the shirt; at another show, this time in Glendale, Arizona, a fan pelted her with a necklace while she was singing. “See these scrapes on my hands? That is from the fans,” Eilish says in the film.

But she tells me the hardest thing about her latest tour was the fact that she’d performed almost all of it without Finneas onstage with her. Together, the two are a multidisciplinary pop powerhouse that has cleaned up for years at the Grammys and the Academy Awards, becoming the youngest two-time Oscar winners for the songs they wrote for 2021’s James Bond film No Time to Die and 2023’s Barbie.

“It was a few years in the making,” says Eilish of her decision to tour without her brother, who has released an EP and three albums on his own, including For Cryin’ Out Loud! in 2024. “We got so busy that we would only see each other right before going onstage,” Eilish says. “Finneas and Andrew [Eilish’s touring drummer], who were the only band members I had back in the day, performed on some sort of platform that was hard to leave. Finneas was stuck in a tower—like Rapunzel! He never said it, but I was feeling like, ‘You have more to be doing than being my band member in the back.’”

Although fans have speculated about the nature of his absence, both Eilish and Finneas tell me that her touring solo was a mutual decision. In the film, Eilish can be seen tearing up at a letter from her brother wishing her luck on their first tour apart. Finneas dropped by a few of Eilish’s shows for moral support—and eventually joined her onstage to sing. “It’s basically true that I don’t like touring, but I love the show part of it,” Finneas says. “And I love being around Billie. This past year, when she would be on tour for months, I missed her a lot.”

“I heard somebody say, ‘Did you guys hear Finneas and Billie had a falling-out?’” Eilish says. “Finneas and I have never and will never have a falling-out, ever in our lives. We’ll get in the biggest fucking fight you’ve ever heard of in your life…and five minutes later, we’re back, laughing and making music. It’s sibling shit. There’s nothing else in the world like sibling relationships.”

She later muses, “If I never saw Finneas at all, I might literally never make a song again….” She trails off, seemingly considering the flip side of that closeness. “But how do we move on and have separate lives?”

Eilish says she had to muster the strength to go it alone for the first time. She brought friends along, old and new, as opening acts for her shows, including her partner Nat Wolff and his brother Alex, The Marías, Towa Bird, Ashnikko, Lucy Dacus, and Young Miko. She also indulged in family road trip staples—“I love that kind of shit,” she says. She stopped by a pottery-making class in Tulsa, embarked on a zip-lining excursion in Austin, and signed up for a ropes course in Australia. “I advocated for not being gone for longer than four weeks at a time without a break,” she says. “Performing is my actual favorite thing in the world to do. So when I feel like I don’t like it? That’s when I want to recalibrate so I can enjoy it again.”

Eilish and Finneas came together at the Grammys in February, where their Hit Me Hard and Soft B-side, “Wildflower,” won Song of the Year. “It was a miracle,” she says. “Finneas and I thought it would be an underrated song. It was one of my favorites, but I was like, ‘This isn’t gonna be the hit. It’s a freaking guitar ballad!’”

Cameron tells me he was drawn to “Wildflower,” too, while cutting concert footage. He says her performance of it is the standout moment in the film. “I’m very, very fond of ‘Wildflower,’ ” Cameron says. “I mean, I like the up-tempo songs too, where she’s bouncing around like a crazy whirling dervish. But it’s one of the most beautiful scenes in the film. Everybody lights up the stadium with their phones; it’s almost like 10,000 candles get lit. We were blessed to have an amazing camera operator, a young guy named Cole Peterson, 22 years old, up there with a gimbal camera arched around Billie. She sustains these notes that are just phenomenal in that song. I think of them almost as operatic arias. It’s very beautiful.”

Recalling the scene, Eilish demonstrates her vocal melismas from the song for me. (She adds that she listens to herself on Spotify more than any other artist, coming in at number one on her own year-end Wrapped list: “My friends make fun of me,” she says, but “I’m sorry, I make the music I want to listen to.”) “When I wrote the melodies for ‘Wildflower,’ I remember thinking, ‘These are fucking sick and I don’t know if people are gonna get it,’” she explains. “I’ve always been really inspired by Arabic singers—my dad and I have bonded over our love for Arabic music. Like, I freaking love [Lebanese singer] Nancy Ajram. She’s one of my favorite singers.”

It’s in those moments of musical reverie that Eilish indulges her more romantic side. She says her favorite movie of Cameron’s is Titanic, with a wistful sigh. “I hate to be so on the nose, but it’s a beautiful movie. There was like, me before I watched that movie, and me after I watched the movie. My friends and I watched it when we were 12, and it was the first day that I decided I would start swearing.”

Eilish has a fierce rebel spirit. Upon accepting her latest Grammy Award in February, she riled up conservative politicians and commentators when she spoke out against the escalating ICE raids, stating, “No one is illegal on stolen land.” And when she appeared at the WSJ. Magazine Innovator Awards in October, she openly challenged billionaires in the room, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Star Wars creator George Lucas, to part with some of their wealth. “If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?” she asked the crowd. “People need empathy and help more than ever. Especially in our country.…If you have money, it would be great to use it for good things, maybe give it to some people that need it.” Her speech wasn’t just lip service. That same night, it was announced that she had pledged $11.5 million of the revenue from her last tour, which reportedly amounts to a little less than a quarter of her net worth, to multiple charities and organizations. (She raised the money by selling special “Changemaker” tickets to fans who wished to pay a little extra to help combat food inequality and the climate crisis.)

“I was raised like this,” explains Eilish of her comfort with speaking out. “When you have this insane platform that you can use to advocate for people, but you’re not advocating for people because you don’t want to be controversial?” she says, petting Shark as he snoozes peacefully in the seat between us. “Why is it controversial to step in when someone’s getting bullied and try to stop it? Yeah, you’re probably gonna have to deal with some problems, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.”

In spite of her critics’ best efforts to tamp down her fighting spirit, what keeps her coming back to the public eye is the camaraderie she shares with her fans through her songwriting. “What I am going through actually isn’t just me, it’s everyone,” she says. “‘What Was I Made For?’ was such an intimate little window into my feelings. And in my head, I feel like, ‘Oh my God, I’m the only person who feels this way.’ And when you’re in a room with thousands of people singing back to you the lyrics that you wrote alone about something specific to you? And they have their entire own relationship to it? It’s the most magical thing in the world. So I make art and music to reach people, to help people.”

The concert film shines a light on those fans, whether they’re in sleeping bags outside the venue or sobbing at the barricades. Many are interviewed in the film, sharing stories of the songs that resonated most with them—songs about survival, loneliness, depression. Many of them arrived dressed in a tomboyish style similar to Eilish’s, citing her as the key to unlocking new avenues for their gender expression.

“When you’re in a room with thousands of people singing back to you the lyrics that you wrote alone about something specific to you?.…It’s the most magical thing in the world.”—Billie Eilish

“Setting aside the quality of the songwriting, the emotionality and all—for her fans, it’s the fact that they grew up together,” Cameron says. “They’ve been through the teenage wars, and she was there for them. They watched her go through things, and they watched her turn it into art. Not just girls, but a lot of guys, too. There’s zero objectification, 100 percent identification. She says, ‘I’m going to wear my loose clothes. I’m going to be comfortable in my own skin, not as some virtuous role model, but to be a model of truthfulness to oneself.’”

For Eilish, being true to herself means giving credit where it’s due. “I’m not the first person who’s worn baggy clothes,” she says of her wardrobe, citing inspirations like Harlem fashion influencer Bloody Osiris and hip-hop icons Tyler, the Creator and Missy Elliott. But she also craved the freedom of movement afforded by these clothes, and the resulting gender euphoria of it all. “I had a really, really toxic relationship with my body,” Eilish says. “I had a lot of eating issues. I remember putting on, like, a big shirt and the relief that I felt. At the same time, it was my love for hip-hop culture and wanting to be a man. This is the misogyny that we all have within us…which is that I didn’t want to be seen as feminine, and therefore weak. It’s not right. I’ve found a good way of not feeling like that.”

She’s found herself. But she’s still finding new dimensions. For one, she tells me she’s eyeing some acting opportunities. In March, Deadline reported that Eilish was in talks to make her film acting debut in an upcoming adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar. Though the role itself is yet to be announced, director Sarah Polley, whose 2022 film Women Talking won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, will be at the helm. “Writing and directing a film is so much work. I don’t know if that’ll ever be a thing that I do, but the acting side [is what] I’m really interested in,” she says. “We’ll see where that takes us.”

According to Cameron, though, the most heroic role Eilish could play is herself. “I’ve been a serial offender in extolling the virtues of female power and its many dimensions,” Cameron says, musing on his past films. “[Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour] is just a continuation of that same motif as a filmmaker. I’ve gotten a rare opportunity to do an intimate portrait of a female artist I admire. If she had turned out to be a complete diva and a horrific person, I don’t think I’d feel about the film the way I feel right now. But I feel very proud of the film, and proud of her and what she does.”

Even if she is a little fatigued by the omnipresence of cameras around her, whether they be smartphones or Cameron’s bulky 3D machines, Eilish can already appreciate the value of having a time capsule of her most epic tour to date. “Capturing a show that I can watch when I’m old and feel like I’m there again…it gives me chills,” she says. “And I’m so grateful that it’s going to live forever.”

Via: Elle