Billie Eilish Dishes On Creating 'No Time To Die': ‘It Has To Make Sense’

Singer Billie Eilish is opening up about creating “No Time To Die.”

The theme song for the latest James Bond movie was a collaboration between her and her brother, Finneas O’Connell. Composer Hans Zimmer, who also composed the soundtrack, also helped create the song.

In a new interview with Deadline, the three musicians explained how “No Time To Die” came to be.

During the interview, O’Connell said, “We kind of threw our hat in the ring. We just told them how excited we were by the idea of writing a Bond song.”

“And it was actually kind of fun to write,” Eilish offered. “Sometimes writing songs is a horrible experience. But on this… I remember I was reading the lyrics after, trying to figure out whether it was me or Finneas who wrote this line or that line, but you just kind of forget. You totally forget because, really, we wrote it together. And it was fun.”

“I was surprised by that, honestly,” O’Connell added. “We felt so beholden to writing a great Bond theme. The best setup is to write without any expectations. Really, when you write with no expectations, that’s how you get a song like ‘Bad Guy’. You go, ‘Let’s try this, try that, mess around with it.’ With ‘No Time to Die’, we were like, ‘Oh God, we have to write a great song.’ But we became aware how weird it was that we were having just a wonderful time writing it.”

Hans Zimmer knew the moment he heard it that it was the perfect song for the soundtrack.

“As soon as I heard this song, I really tried to listen to the others, but… I thought, to have such elegance and such beauty in a Bond movie could be just fantastic,” he said.

When she was creating the movie theme, she and O’Connell only had the film’s pre-credit sequence to navigate by.

“It feels like it has to make sense in the context of the movie,” Eilish says. “I don’t really want to see a Bond movie where the main title song doesn’t have anything to do with the film. That’s going to be super unsatisfying. And what was cool about writing a song from the perspective of the movie itself was that we love writing characters and narratives into our music, and I feel the music we’re most proud of is the music where we’ve come up with a plot for the song ahead of writing it.”

To help her songwriting process, Eilish explained that she adopted a certain perspective when crafting the song.

“I wrote the song from the perspective of somebody I had hurt,” Eilish explains. “It was a really interesting situation for me, because honestly, we never think about how our own actions are perceived from other people’s point of view. Or, we do, but we don’t do it enough. It taught me a lot, to put myself in somebody else’s shoes, and it was fun, too, because you can create a character and write about something other than yourself. You don’t have to expose yourself; you don’t have to be telling your truth.”

Zimmer interjected, saying, “But it is the truth.” Eilish offered, “It’s a different path to truth.”

During the interview, Eilish was asked if she found the process of tackling personal truths and insecurities in her music therapeutic. The “bad guy” singer was quick to say it wasn’t.

“I feel like people always say making music is therapeutic, and I genuinely don’t agree,” she said. “I don’t really enjoy it. I only enjoy it afterward, when I play it. I’m sure both of them do.”

Both O’Connell and Zimmer confirmed that they find it therapeutic.

“See? I don’t,” Eilish insisted. “I love listening to what I’ve made. I love having made music. I love performing it and singing it and dancing to it. The process for me is far from therapeutic. The difference is, they’re nerds for the process, and I’m not.”

“No, but it is therapeutic,” O’Connell shared. “I’ve been to stints of therapy in my life, and I think the only reason I haven’t been to more is because of songwriting.”

“I think the only reason I survived is because I got to play the piano,” Zimmer added. “I wouldn’t have cared if nobody listened at all. I didn’t make this career. Nobody understands this, but I think you two will. People ask me, ‘Bond?’ And I go, ‘Yes.’ Then I’m like, ‘I have no idea how to do this, and it’s really scary because I don’t want to ruin it for everybody.’”

“It’s so true,” Eilish agreed. “A huge part of this crazy life that we now live is being terrified to do something, but knowing that you just gotta say, ‘Yes’. Not because other people are telling you to but because you know that it’s right.”