Billie Eilish film offers intimate look at teen music sensation
‘Billie Eilish: The World’s a Litle Blurry’ follows the American singersongwriter’s close relationship with her family, performing on stage, on the road, meeting fans and collecting five Grammy Awards
Anew documentary captures Billie Eilish’s meteoric rise to fame, in an intimate portrayal of the teenager recording music at home, passing her driving test, going through a relationship break-up and meeting her idol Justin Bieber.
“Billie Eilish: The World’s a Litle Blurry” follows the American singer-songwriter’s close relationship with her family, performing on stage, on the road, meeting fans and collecting five Grammy Awards, the music industry’s highest honours.
Filmmaker R.J. Cutler first met Eilish, known for her unique sound, when she was 16, describing her as “real and awesome and easy and quirky and funny and somebody I thought I’d love to make a movie about”.
“It’s the story of this... remarkable figure... who is simultaneously going through a kind of artistic arrival... and... professional arrival and... coming of age,” he told media. Eilish, now 19, and her producing partner brother Finneas are regularly shown making music together at home, rehearsing songs such as the theme for the upcoming James Bond movie “No Time To Die”.
“It’s very exciting to see how they work together and collaborate together,” Cutler said. “It’s very natural.”
The film, released on Apple TV+ on Friday, features home footage of Eilish as a child and shows her working on her chart-topping album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”. It ends with her Grammys win last year, when she became the youngest person to scoop the top four awards in one night. Cutler said his team had complete editorial control over the film, which also shows Eilish batling health issues and learning to deal with fame. In one scene, she is seen telling an audience: “This is so weird you guys, I’m nobody. I don’t know why you like me.”
In 2015, 13-year-old Eilish began working on songs with her brother, Finneas O’connell, who had been writing and producing for several years and had his own band. The first songs they recorded together were called “She’s Broken” and “Fingers Crossed”. “The first songs that we worked on, we didn’t write together. He wrote this song called ‘She’s Broken’ and I wrote one called ‘Fingers Crossed,’ and we recorded them and put them out on Soundcloud, just for fun,” she recalls. On November 18, 2015, Eilish released the song “Ocean Eyes”. The track was writen, mixed, and produced by Finneas, who had writen and produced it originally for his band the Slightly’s, before realising it would be a beter fit for Eilish’s vocals. He gave it to Eilish when her dance teacher at the Revolution Dance Center (Honolulu Avenue, Los Angeles) Fred Diaz asked them to write a song for choreography.
The siblings uploaded the song to Soundcloud, where Diaz could access and download it. The song received several hundred thousand listens in two weeks, and Finneas’ manager Danny Rukasin reached out to him to discuss Eilish’s potential. In Rukasin’s opinion, she could achieve significant success with Finneas’ help.