Making 'Barbie': Greta Gerwig on getting Mattel onside, using UK talent and wanting to make films "for the next 40 years"

When indie film favourite Greta Gerwig agreed to take on the immense job of breathing cinematic life into the world’s most famous plastic icon, she did so with some clear conditions.

A Barbie project had been simmering in Hollywood for some time, tossed from Universal Pictures to Sony Pictures, with Amy Schumer and Anne Hathaway attached at various points to play the lead in the 2010s. But the highly arched shoe never quite fit. In 2018, Sony’s option lapsed and canny Australian star Margot Robbie swooped, pitching her LuckyChap production company — which had a first-look deal with Warner Bros at the time — to Barbie owner Mattel as the perfect partner.

Robbie and Gerwig were not close friends, but had met on the 2018 awards promotional circuit for Lady Bird, Gerwig’s solo directing debut, and I, Tonya, which Robbie starred in and produced. “I was extremely impressed by her,” says Gerwig. “She’s so smart and deeply involved in the nitty gritty of producing.”

When Robbie approached Gerwig to helm the Barbie project, Gerwig’s first condition was her husband and creative collaborator Noah Baumbach be brought on to co-write. “It was just an instinct,” recalls Gerwig. “I love writing with him and we hadn’t written together in a while. He seems like an unlikely writer of Barbie. If you had to pick a person, he wouldn’t probably be top of mind. There was something about that that made me laugh — ‘it’s Noah Baumbach’s Barbie!’”

Another hard-and-fast condition was that Mattel would not get a treatment or outline ahead of them writing the script. “If you leave us alone, we’ll write you the script,” Gerwig says of their approach. “We want the freedom to do whatever we want and to explore things in different ways. If we’d done a treatment or outline and got notes, it’s already been changed and you’ve not even written anything. You have to let yourself write what is most outrageous, and see how far you get.”

It was also Gerwig’s ambition to shoot in the UK. When working on the script, her vision had been for the film to resemble a candy-colour 1950s soundstage musical and, to build that, she had two UK creatives in mind. One was Jacqueline Durran, who won the costume design Oscar in 2020 for Gerwig’s Little Women. “She is someone I have worked with a lot, and I love her,” says the director. The other was production designer Sarah Greenwood (Atonement, Beauty And The Beast), who, she says, “does that hand-made, older-technique theatricality in camera extremely well. Luckily, she said yes.”

UK talent

The film was shot predominantly at the UK’s Warner Bros Studios Leavesden, with some real-world scenes filmed in Los Angeles, and the cast is brimming with UK favourites including My Mad Fat Diary’s Sharon Rooney; Sex Education stars Emma Mackey, Ncuti Gatwa and Connor Swindells; Stath Lets Flats’ Jamie Demetriou; People Just Do Nothing’s Asim Chaudhry; Industry’s Marisa Abela; and Gavin & Stacey’s Rob Brydon.

“I do feel British actors have a very strong sense of being part of the company, and that was very much the feel I wanted,” reflects Gerwig. “It’s like when you’re in a musical at school and everyone’s in it. They tapped into that feeling very quickly and that was something I was looking for.”

There was only one man who was ‘Kenough’ for the role of Barbie’s loyal companion Ken. Way before he was cast, all of Ken’s lines had ‘Ryan Gosling’ scribbled next to them in the script. “We knew we were writing [the character of Barbie] for Margot, but when we were writing for Ken, we decided to write for Ryan,” says Gerwig. “I had never met Ryan. I just knew he was going to be great. I sent him the script, we talked on the phone. He said yes right away, and then with schedules, it seemed like it wasn’t going to work out for a minute. He had to bow out at one point, but I wouldn’t let him. He said it may take a year, so I said, ‘See you in a year.’

“He’s very funny, but his comedy comes from taking it extremely seriously, which is exactly what we wanted,” she continues. “We didn’t want an actor who would stand outside of it and let you know he wasn’t really that person. Ryan has that level of commitment.”

There was one person, however, who Gerwig did not want to see in front of the camera in the film. “I never want to act in my own movies. It sounds like the hardest thing to do,” she admits. “As an actor, I like being able to give over to the director’s vision. As a director, my favourite thing is to get front-row seats watching the greatest actors in the world. I wouldn’t get to do that if I were on the other side of the camera.”

California native Gerwig launched into the industry as an actor, after all her applications for playwriting Masters were rejected. She made a name for herself on the US low-budget indie scene, with her first role starring in Joe Swanberg’s LOL in 2006, and Jay and Mark Duplass’s 2008 film Baghead another early performance. Her partnership with Swanberg saw her co-write and star in Hannah Takes The Stairs in 2007, and as co-writer, co-director, co-star and fellow producer of Nights And Weekends in 2008.

Gerwig became a stalwart of the ‘mumblecore’ movement, noted for its naturalistic acting and seemingly improvised dialogue. This approach has influenced her career, from Baumbach’s 2012 black-and-white comedy drama Frances Ha (which Gerwig co-wrote and played the eponymous lead) to her more mainstream directing outings — Lady Bird, receiving an Oscar nomination for directing and Oscar and Bafta nominations for original screenplay, and Little Women, for which she was Oscar- and Bafta-nominated for best adapted screenplay.

“I like my writing — whether it’s this [Barbie] or Lady Bird or Little Women — to sound improvised. But I don’t like improvisation,” she posits.

Billion-dollar first

Barbie is 2023’s biggest box-office hit to date, crossing the $1bn global threshold within three weeks of its July release, making Gerwig the first female solo director to helm a billion-dollar film. “It’s beyond my wildest dreams of what I hoped for the movie,” she enthuses.

Thinking of the film as a theatrical spectacle from the earliest stages of script drafting was essential to its success. “So much of it was born out of a desire to go back and be in the cinema with people,” Gerwig recalls. “When Noah and I started writing it, it was March 2020 [the start of the global Covid-19 lockdowns] and no-one was in movie theatres, so we decided to do something outrageous. Something you would only want to see with a group of people. That that’s happened makes me feel like everyone had the secret dream I had, wanting to be with people in a movie theatre, laughing, crying and singing along.”

Of course, dealing with a budget of $145m for a film about the crown jewel of a multi-billion-dollar commercial machine such as Mattel was not going to be plain sailing for a filmmaker whose career was built on having an unconventional eye.

“There were certainly moments of Mattel worrying about it — almost more about the way we took certain criticisms of Barbie head-on,” shares Gerwig. “They felt they had worked hard not to do that, and now we were bringing it up again. But it’s the history of the doll, and everybody knows it. It’s great they now have inclusive body sizes, but everyone knows what it came from. They got on board with it and said they would be comfortable being uncomfortable. I think a big part of that is the CEO Ynon Kreiz gave me and the team total faith. He trusted us.”

This confidence extended to allowing Will Ferrell to play a buffoonish version of a Mattel CEO. “Ynon was very game. He said, ‘I get it, do what you want.’ I don’t know how many CEOs would say that.”

Bringing on board the might of UK producer David Heyman, whose credits include the Harry Potter and Paddington franchises, Gravity and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, was also invaluable. “It took about seven months to write [the screenplay], and David joined the project in the winter of 2020,” says Gerwig. “It just became clear it was this more complex thing, and he had worked a lot with Warner Bros, as well as producing Noah’s film Marriage Story. I knew him already and loved him.”

A major driver in the film’s success was its fierce marketing and promotional campaign, which took over every physical and digital space imaginable in the weeks leading up to release, from dating apps to London’s red buses getting a fuchsia Barbie rebrand. And Gerwig is thankful the cast managed to work the promo circuit before July 14, when the SAG-AFTRA strike commenced. “We did change things around because we knew it might happen,” she says.

Double bill

Part of the film’s push came from an unlikely partnership, with Christopher Nolan’s epic Oppenheimer being released at the same time, creating the ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon. Has Gerwig exchanged notes with Nolan on the trend?

“We haven’t talked about it,” she confesses. “He’s an emblem of what’s possible, how he’s managed to be an auteur while making movies seen all over the world. It was an honour to be sharing the moment together. I got to know him a bit — I made Lady Bird the year he made Dunkirk. He and his wife were very kind. We’ll scrapbook it together. I can definitely see that in our future!”

Gerwig remains non-committal about how she is going to follow up making the year’s biggest film. She is attached to direct two Chronicles Of Narnia adaptations for Netflix, which she describes as “quite the Everest. I’ve been thinking about it since before I directed Barbie. That feels like a theme — I had written Little Women before I directed Lady Bird, then I went back to Little Women and rewrote it after Lady Bird.”

Gerwig also has a co-writing credit on Disney’s upcoming live-action Snow White, but says: “I was hired for a couple of weeks. I did a ‘pass’ — I wrote some jokes.”

What she does know is that a Barbie sequel is not currently the centre of her focus. “Right now, I don’t even know if I can make dinner,” she admits. “I need to regenerate.” But, she says, she is here for the long haul. “I want to make movies for the next 40 years.”

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