Filmmakers love to use a documentary, specifically a concert film, as a palate cleanser. Martin Scorsese risked his job on New York, New York to direct The Last Waltz for The Band over Thanksgiving weekend in 1976. Jonathan Demme squeezed in Stop Making Sense following the difficult shoot of his first Hollywood film, Swing Shift. James Cameron joins the tradition by breaking up his decades of Avatar films with Billie Eilish—Hit Me Hard And Soft: The Tour (Live In 3D), which displays Eilish’s considerable talents, Cameron’s groundbreaking 3D technology, and the director’s hands-on approach to filmmaking.
Shot over four performances at Co-op Live, the United Kingdom’s largest arena, Hit Me Hard And Soft situates Eilish at the center of the experience, with between twenty and thirty 3D cameras all on her. She even has a handheld “Billie Cam” that brings the audience inches away from the Grammy-winner as she croons hits like “Lunch” and “Wildfire.” Cameron undoubtedly succeeds at bringing her performance to life, with the 3D intensifying the illusion of really being there. There are moments so immersive, you’ll find yourself craning your neck around like the audience members on screen. It’s the perfect advertisement for the technology, which Cameron has quarantined on Pandora since the initial 3D boom subsided in the mid-2010s. But it’s also some sly promotion for the man behind the camera.
Cameron has no shame in selling himself, and at this point, his myth has spread beyond movie culture. Whether reading hardcover biographies, like The Futurist, or preteen ebooks, like James Cameron: Truck Driver To Director, Cameron’s persona as a self-made success story is well-documented. Legend has it, he taught himself filmmaking by reading textbooks and grad papers in the cab of his truck. After seeing Star Wars in 1977, he left the convoy behind for show business, making his way through the Roger Corman system before breaking through with The Terminator. This period established Cameron as a tradesman rather than a member of the film school generation that preceded him. However, his ambition as a craftsman also required him to play carnival barker. Like Tom Cruise, he wants people to know that he did all this for real.
In interviews, he’s quick to announce his underwater accomplishments. When The A.V. Clubinterviewed him in 2023, he was sure to mention his 2012 dive to the hadal zone, the deepest region of the ocean. When those billionaires attempted to pilot a doomed submersible to the Titanic, Cameron was one of the first people who news outlets and the National Transportation Safety Board contacted for comment. “Jim Cameron is the type of director who pushes you to the edge,” Leo Burmester told Starlog in a feature on The Abyss, “but he doesn’t make you do anything he wouldn’t do himself.”
Cameron committed these bona fides to film through documentary work. After declaring himself “king of the world” at the Oscars, Cameron joined Titanic star Bill Paxton in a pair of submersibles to the real sunken ship for 2003’s Ghosts Of The Abyss. Told from Paxton’s perspective, the film restages the opening chunk of Titanic as a non-fiction documentary and takes Cameron’s then-state-of-the-art underwater cameras and audiences through the wreck. He’d head below, once again, for a follow-up documentary, 2005’s Aliens Of The Deep, which serves as a prologue to Avatar just as Ghosts is an epilogue to Titanic. This time, Cameron uses his camera to explore the biology of deep-water creatures, taking NASA astronauts below the surface to see what can be gleaned about distant planets from the bottom of our own.
The sibling docs serve multiple purposes. They are educational films designed for IMAX theaters to show off the 3D technology Cameron would spend the rest of his career proselytizing. His underwater photography, even on a standard-definition DVD, is stellar, offering glimpses of the world Cameron would take 20 years to recreate in The Way Of Water. But both documentaries also show Cameron as a member of the crew, refusing to single him out as the Oscar-winning director of the most successful movies of all time. He’s simply another deep-sea explorer escorting Bill Paxton and his Titanic co-star Lewis Abernathy to the Titanic, and taking astronauts below the surface. Through this, Cameron depicts directing as a full-contact sport, and himself as much an explorer as a technician and artist.
That idea is again on display in Hit Me Hard And Soft, in which Cameron presents himself as one half of a creative partnership, ready to make Eilish’s vision a reality. The film alternates between chunks of concert footage and behind-the-scenes interviews with Eilish, during which Cameron casts himself in a supporting role. He deliberately includes himself in interview footage, cutting to shots of himself holding a massive 3D camera mere feet from his subject as he asks her about what it means to be a woman in music. This is in line with the film’s tagline: “She changed music. He changed movies. Together, they’ll reinvent the concert experience.” His participation is clearly a selling point for the film.
But Eilish and Cameron were brought together because his wife, Suzy Amis Cameron, is an activist friend of her mother, Maggie Baird, and that familiarity is evident on screen. Like in his other docs, he doesn’t get much of an introduction. Instead, Eilish greets him in the film with a warm “Jimothy!” It isn’t until a few minutes later that Eilish points at Cameron in the near distance and identifies him, “That’s James Cameron.” This 75-year-old man’s name must have inherent value to her Zoomer audience, because the words “Titanic,” “Avatar,” and “Terminator” are never uttered.
And that importance persists in the meat of the film itself. While Cameron does center Eilish’s remarkable talents as a singer and performer—capturing the visceral thrill of her running across the football-field-sized stage before thousands of screaming fans—his presence is felt behind every shot (because he injects himself so thoroughly into the film), making him feel more like the sole director despite Eilish’s contributions. In the film, though, he keeps up appearances. When discussing their collaboration early on, he tells her that the film will be credited “Directed by Billie Eilish” and “with James Cameron” in teeny-tiny print just below. As the credits roll, Cameron’s name is the first listed.
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