Seeing Billie Eilish Live, Almost

James Cameron, in a surprising and successful twist in his filmography, briefly escaped the prison he built for himself on the planet Pandora and abandoned his presumably exhausting work on the “Avatar” sequels. The next film is scheduled for 2029, but Disney is starting to tremble with fear and think twice about whether this release has any chance. In the meantime, he is attached to his third documentary, and the first one that does not take place underwater. Cameron, 71, directs, shoots and edits Billie Eilish’s concert film. Despite the 47 years between them, he seems to understand her, her vision, and perhaps sees in her someone who reminds him of the heroines of his films, wounded fighters who lead armies and save lives. 1.3 million tickets were sold for Eilish’s tour, which traveled through 88 cities around the world, and now the film arrives to summarize the experience, in front of the audience and behind the scenes.

I had no reason to go see this concert film, because I had already seen it. In October 2024, I saw Eilish’s performance in true 3D in New Jersey. I entered the arena indifferent and left it a fan. The show, which Eilish fully helped design, is simply excellent. But when the concert film came out this week, I rushed to see it, not because of Eilish but because of Cameron. Cameron is a constant innovator, and cinema is an endless toy box for him to experiment with new languages and technologies, and if he decided to direct, shoot and edit and do it in 3D, I was curious to see what he had done. Eilish, I had no doubt, was his inspiration. And how could she not be, given the sight of her performance. The obvious question is how to turn such an impressive audiovisual experience into a film that would not disappoint. The final result, credited jointly to Eilish and Cameron, is one of the best concert films we have seen in a very long time.

With great curiosity, Cameron puts his cameras into every corner of the huge Manchester and Phoenix arenas, exactly a year after I saw her, and with a slightly different setlist. He films the performance, but also what happens above and below the stage, before and after the show. There is plenty of pyrotechnics and stagecraft whose secrets Cameron’s cameras reveal, but above all he succeeds, with great talent, in bottling Eilish’s enormous energy on stage. Her feet are bandaged, her muscles are stiff, her ankle is sprained and her calves hurt, but she runs in a sprint from side to side on the 360-degree stage, then on the floor around the stage, then climbs onto a rising platform. Cameron not only follows her with his fleet of cameras, he also edits the film with accelerated energy.

One of the beautiful things about the film is that for each viewer it provides a different experience. Eilish fans who did not see her live will enjoy a record of the performance they missed. Those who were at one of the shows will be thrilled by the glimpse behind the scenes of the production, from setup to teardown, from planning to the encore. And even Eilish may discover, while watching the film, everything she does not see when she is on stage, the 20,000 outsiders who gather every night for her because she tells them, as they say on Pandora, “I see you.” That is Cameron’s great stroke of genius as a documentarian, the fact that he turns his cameras toward the audience. The audience that Eilish brilliantly uses as a backing choir, the audience whose faces she cannot see and who are washed in tears from excitement over her. Eilish’s shots give the film its rhythm, melody and energy. But by filming the audience, Cameron preserves in the film exactly what makes Eilish’s performance for the people who come to see her live, chills.