Billie Eilish is levitating. Or so it seems. When the pop star first emerges on screen in the mouthful Billie Eilish — Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), she is suspended above a cube built of LED screens, surrounded by a sold-out crowd of over 23,000 fans in the center of the U.K.’s largest arena — Manchester’s Co-op Live. She launches into the midtempo “Chihiro,” a house experiment from her latest album, and the 3D magic begins. In the contemporary pop music landscape, Eilish is a rulebreaker — and so is this work.
The new concert film, co-directed by Eilish and three-time Academy Award winner James Cameron, was his idea. Cameron emailed Eilish’s mother, Maggie Baird — a friend of his wife via their shared interest in plant-based diets and environmentalism — and suggested they shoot Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft tour in 3D.
It is new territory for Cameron, in some ways, and old hat in others. His production company has done a number of concert films, including one with Eilish’s musical hero Justin Bieber, but Cameron hasn’t sat in the director’s chair of a project like this one. A 3D concert film also brings up a number of technical challenges — a passion of Cameron’s, as anyone who has seen the blockbuster Avatar franchise could attest to — and as a fellow outlier of industry, the pairing succeeds.
Eilish, too, is no stranger to film: She’s the subject of the 2021 documentary, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, and a concert film released that same year, Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles. This, however, is her first time co-directing a feature. And where The World’s a Little Blurry served as a composite of her come-up and various successes, Hit Me Hard and Soft is dedicated to the concert film format while pushing its boundaries.
While no movie can serve as the perfect replica of a transformative live music experience, Billie Eilish — Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) works an immersive magic. Every seat is the best seat in the house in these shots; common issues with concert films find solutions. Audience members are celebrated like additional characters. When the camera is on them, their voices are heard loud — sniffling, screams, cheers, off-key sing-alongs get their shine, sometimes above Eilish in the mix, mimicking the experience of swaying in the crowd.
