Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry clocks in at a whopping two hours and 20 minutes runtime, so you better believe that there is plenty of top-tier Billie Eilish content packed into this film. Directed by R. J. Cutler (The War Room), this new documentary—now streaming on Apple TV+, as well as playing in select theaters— takes fans from the young musician writing her debut studio album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? alongside her brother Finneas O’Connell in their childhood home in 2018, all the way up to the night where she and her brother took home all the Grammys in 2020.
Much of the story will be familiar to the hardcore stans, but this time it comes with high-quality behind-the-scenes footage of Billie, her brother, and her parents. You’ll even get to put some video to the moment where Bille and Finneas were recording in their home studio (Finneas’s bedroom), laughing hysterically at the idea of Billie removing her Invisalign before beginning a recording session. This audio file—”I have taken out my Invisalign, and this is the album”—becoming the opening track, titled “!!!!!!!” of her debut, Grammy-winning album. This film captures history in the making, people!
That said, there’s a lot to take in. In an effort to help you out, Decider has highlighted just a few of the big takeaways of Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry. No doubt some of these things won’t be news to hardcore stans, but for the casual fan, this documentary goes a long way toward providing a more intimate and close-up look at one of the youngest megastars in the world. There is much more to dig into beyond this list, so be sure to stream Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry on Apple TV+ to get the full picture.
In the meantime, here are nine big takeaways from the Billie Eilish documentary.
She and Brandon Quention Adams, aka "Que," were dating, but ultimately broke up.
Throughout the documentary, which was filmed over a period of two years from 2018 to early 2020, Billie drops references to her boyfriend, “Que.” Cutler films the pop star on the phone with him, telling him that she loves him, and also captures her moments of frustration that he never seems to make time for her. He doesn’t do anything for Valentine’s Day, and doesn’t spend much time with her at Coachella, despite the fact that she got him the tickets. But eventually, he does come to her trailer, and we see a brief scene of them together joking around. He compliments her singing, and she basks in his attention. But by the end of the film, Billie explains the two broke up because she felt that they wanted different things.
Que’s full name is Brandon Quention Adams, and he’s an LA-based rapper and musician whose stage name is 7:AMP.
She butted heads with the crew on the music video for "when the party's over."
Fans get a behind-the-scenes look at the development and production of Billie’s “when the party’s over” music video. We see Billie plan out the video shot-by-shot in her family’s backyard, using her mom as a stand-in. Billie already seems worried that her director Carlos López Estrada (Blindspotting, Raya and the Last Dragon) will have ideas that she disagrees with. Sure enough, when we cut to the day of the shoot, the atmosphere on set seems tense—so much so that Billie tells her mother, “For the next videos, I’m directing them all myself.”
Billie really, really, really loves Justin Bieber.
Billie Eilish fans already know that the singer was a Belieber in her youth, but The World’s A Little Blurry makes it clear just how much Bieber truly means to her. At the moment where the two of them meet at Coachella, she is absolutely overcome with emotion, clinging to him while he strokes her hair. Later, in the car, she explains that she knows everything about him—down to the day, time, and the hospital he was born in. (Her brother asks her what hospital she was born in, and she has no idea.) Her devotion seems to mean a lot to Bieber as well, and it really is a touching moment.
Bieber asked to hop on ' When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?' three days before the release.
The Never Say Never star slid into Billie Eilish’s Instagram DMs to propose a collaboration three days before her album release. Billie was thrilled of course, and responded, “You could literally hop on a song and say ‘poop,’ and I’d be happy with it.” They settled on a remix of “Bad Guy,” sung by Bieber, which was released off of the album. Billie loved it.
She did not recognize Orlando Bloom when she met him...
While at Coachella, Billie hears that Katy Perry wants to meet, and dutifully goes to give her a hug and accept some unprompted words of wisdom from the pop star that came before her. Perry brings along her fiancé—Pirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings star Orlando Bloom. Apparently, Bloom is obsessed with “Bad Guy,” and plays it all the time. Billie takes the compliments and hugs with a smile, but it’s clear that Perry and Bloom are more excited to meet her than vice-versa.
Later, in the trailer, Billie’s brother is telling some friends that they met Will Turner from the Pirates movies, and she exclaims, “That guy? Was him?! No way! I thought that was just some dude that Katy Perry met!”
...but she made sure to go back and meet him properly, after she realized who he was.
Thankfully, Billie gets a second chance. This time she gives Bloom a big hug and tells him how much he means to her 9-year-old self. Hey, you can’t blame the young musician for not recognizing Will Turner without his signature tiny mustache, especially when she was stressed out and sleep-deprived at Coachella.
She used to dance 12 hours a week.
Billie explains that she stopped taking professional dance lessons until she tore her growth plate as a child, and stopped dancing altogether. Home videos show her hard at work in the dance studio, learning more traditional pop star choreography than the on-stage jumping she is known for today.
She struggled with self-harm when she was around 14.
“I was literally locking myself in the bathroom and making myself bleed because I thought I deserved it,” Billie says, while she looks through old journal entries of when she was 14 and 15.
She was more happy for her brother than she was for herself re: Grammy nominations.
Near the end of the documentary, Billie’s mother wakes her up for the good news that she’s been nominated for Grammys for Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Album of the Year. But she doesn’t even lift her head off of her pillow until her mother says that her older brother, Finneas O’Connell, was nominated for best producer. When she hears that news, she smiles and says, “Yay, he was so worried about that!” It’s nice to see siblings supporting siblings.
