Triptych Conversations

Feb 28 2025 59 mins 3

Other Episodes

The Masterpieces

1. What Was I Made For? (Billie Eilish, Finneas, 2023)

Written for the soundtrack of Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2023), What Was I Made For? stormed up the charts around the world, including reaching No. 1 in Australia, UK and Ireland. It won both a Grammy and an Oscar the following year.

Billie Eilish shares writing credits for the song with her brother and frequent collaborator, Finneas O’Connell. She described the process like this:

I did not think about myself once in the writing process. I was purely inspired by this movie and this character and the way I thought she would feel, and wrote about that. And then, over the next couple days, I was listening and I was like, girl, how did this … honestly, and I really don’t mean this to come off a conceited way at all, but I do this thing where I make stuff that I don’t even know is … like I’m writing for myself and I don’t even know it. (from Billboard archive)

This is the performance at the Oscars mentioned in the discussion.

2. St Luke as a Painter at the Cross (Francisco de Zurbarán, 1635-40)

Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664) was a Spanish painter working at the height of the counter-Reformation. He was sometimes nicknamed the “Spanish Caravaggio” because of their shared love of the chiaroscuro (light/dark) style, although it is unfair to see him solely in terms of the Italian painter’s legacy from the generation before.

There is debate about the details, but it is likely that the character of St Luke (who was known not as an artist but as one of the New Testament evangelists) is in fact a self-portrait.

Another of his most beloved works is Agnus Dei (The Lamb of God) painted at roughly the same time. Both can be seen in Madrid’s Prado Museum.

3. Andor (created by Tony Gilroy, 2022-)

The Star Wars universe has ‘inspired’ the creation of a number of duds. But the 3 of us are in total agreement that Andor is not one of them.

For all the hokum of creating entire cultures and religious backstories for different planets (invariably with healthy dollops of allusions and resonance from Classical Greece and Rome), Andor feels much more serious and edgy. It is political and personal, capturing a genuine sense of jeopardy. What’s more it has quite the case, including the array of British actors as imperial commanders (due largely since it’s filmed at Pinewood Studios west of London).

Plus as veteran actor Ian Ogilvy apparently once said when asked why baddies are always Brits, “we’re the only ones who don’t mind.” Probably no longer true, but it clearly is in the Star Wars universe.

The Andor series (2nd is coming in April) is the backstory to the movie Rogue One, which itself is a prequel to Star Wars I/IV A New Hope), narrating the means and cost of capturing the plans for the Death Star.