‘It had to be totally bananas’: Greta Gerwig on bringing Barbie to life
Jul 09, 2023
Greta Gerwig’s subtle and beautifully nuanced touch has led to her being hailed as one of Hollywood’s greatest directors. But when she got her teeth into Barbie, she went all-out massive, pink and ‘completely unhinged’One night in April, a stranger I met in a pub pulled out his phone and showed me pictures of something he was working on. We were in a town near to the Leavesden film studios, where the stranger had been constructing sets for Barbie, a film co-written and directed by the American filmmaker Greta Gerwig. “You have to see this,” the man said, before presenting images of a hot-pink, human-sized Barbieland, a place he described as an antidote to our hideously cold winter. Rain was forecast the following day, and even colder cold, but the stranger couldn’t care less. He would be a world away.When I tell Gerwig this story, over Zoom, one day in June, her large eyes brighten. “That makes me feel like a proud mama!” she says, and, “Gosh, that makes me tear up.” Over the hour we spend together, while she sits in Manhattan, in a room she describes as “half office, half baby nursery,” this is the kind of pronounced buoyancy I come to expect from her. Even when I suggest the stranger perhaps shouldn’t have shown me the pictures – the set being locked down, me being a journalist – Gerwig says, in a wink-wink tone, “But I love that he felt he wanted to.” Continue reading...
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