FEATURE:
Tickled Pink
IN THIS PHOTO: Barbie’s director and co-writer, Greta Gerwig/PHOTO CREDIT: Ellen Fedors for Rolling Stone
Welcome to Barbie Land! The Promotional Whirlwind of Greta Gerwig’s Upcoming Blockbuster
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THERE is no doubt that…
IN THIS PHOTO: Margot Robbie and Nicki Minaj at the premiere of Barbie, held at Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall on 9th July in Los Angeles/PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Buckner for Variety
when Barbie is released into the world on 21st July, it will be one of the highest-grossing and popular films of the year. I have already predicted five-star reviews – and I will bring in a review that has already been written – and Academy Awards (Margot Robbie and maybe Rylan Gosling for acting; Greta Gerwig for direction; costumes and cinematography perhaps). As a music journalist, of course I have an interest in the soundtrack. Some of music’s biggest names have contributed songs. From Dual Lipa to Lizzo, there have been some amazing songs added to a soundtrack that everyone should pre-order. It is out on the same day as the film - and, of course, it available on neon pink vinyl! I am pumped about that, but I wanted to look at some of the promotion or the film. When I recently wrote about Barbie going up against Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, I did include an interview involving Greta Gerwig, plus one from Margot Robbie. Because there has been some cool video interviews and features together with press, I will bring that together. I will end with a review of Barbie. The film is undoubtably going to be a masterpiece! More than any other film this year, there is this whole world and brand. This Barbie blitzkrieg has taken the world by storm. So many people getting into the spirit. Although it must be exhausting for stars Margot Robbie and Rylan Gosling, and director and co-writer Greta Gerwig, there is also this thrill of unleashing a huge film into the world. One that is probably primed for a sequel at some point, one would imagine.
I am thrilled that this comedy is out soon, as the genre does not often get this much attention. Such a huge film as Barbie will bring so many people to the cinema. Many who do not have any connection with Barbie. It is a film that has crossed boundaries and borders and seems to have conquered the world! The marketing for the film is terrific. And I mean terrific. It is another reason why Barbie will win awards and massive box office receipts. I shall start with a couple of interviews about the film. I am going to come to some Margot Robbie press, as she is the iconic Barbie in the new film. In one of her most important and impressive roles so far, she has confirmed herself as one of the most iconic and inspiring actors of her generation. I want to start off with a beautiful and brilliant interview Rolling Stone conducted with Greta Gerwig. She discussed making the film and what it was like immersing herself in Barbie Land for several years:
“I know you tend to resist autobiographical interpretations, but when Barbie says, “I don’t wanna be an idea anymore,” something about that really reminded me of your transition from a much-discussed actress to a writer-director.
You know what? It’s so funny. That did not occur to me at all. But now that you say it, of course! When you’re directing something, you have to be a bit stupid about yourself, or a little bit unconscious. And, yes, you’re totally right. And also, I had no idea. But that’s true. It’s completely true.
There are things like I grew up in Sacramento, and Ladybird takes place in Sacramento. But so many of the things that are personal that come through your movies are never the things that are the most obvious to you. The things where you really feel unconsciously seen are things like that, where you realize, “Oh, man, I didn’t hide anywhere.” And that’s always part of the joy of making art for people, is sometimes they understand it more than you do, which is unsettling.
IN THIS PHOTO: Ryan Gosling, Greta Gerwig, Simu Liu, and Marhot Robbie on the set of Barbie/PHOTO CREDIT: Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros
Sorry!
No, but it’s good.
How did you come to decide on Barbie’s arc in the movie?
I hope two things made that journey feel surprising but inevitable. I started from this idea of Barbieland, this place with no death, no aging, no decay, no pain, no shame. We know the story. We’ve heard this story. This is an old story. It’s in a lot of religious literature. What happens to that person? They have to leave. And they have to confront all the things that were shielded from them in this place. So that felt like one thing.
There’s a lovely scene where Barbie sees an older woman — a sight she’d never encountered in Barbieland — and tells her she’s beautiful.
I love that scene so much. And the older woman on the bench is the costume designer Ann Roth. She’s a legend. It’s a cul-de-sac of a moment, in a way — it doesn’t lead anywhere. And in early cuts, looking at the movie, it was suggested, “Well, you could cut it. And actually, the story would move on just the same.” And I said, “If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about.”
Yeah, I kind of thought that was an absolutely key moment for Barbie’s journey.
That’s how I saw it. To me, this is the heart of the movie. The way Margot plays that moment is so gentle and so unforced. There’s the more outrageous elements in the movie that people say, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe Mattel let you do this,” or, “I can’t believe Warner Bros. let you do this.” But to me, the part that I can’t believe that is still in the movie is this little cul-de-sac that doesn’t lead anywhere — except for, it’s the heart of the movie.
Margot said when she first saw the screenplay, she loved it, and was positive that the powers that be would never let you make it. How do you think you got it all through?
The movie in its conception and even from the script stage was always a wild ride. But I think that in the execution of it and the directing of it, it allowed me to go even farther, and to make it even more like a candy-colored explosion of things that people didn’t necessarily think would be the Barbie movie. But, yeah, I can’t account for it. But I’m thrilled to bits that they let me do it this way.
How did you craft the moment where Barbie finally learns that some women in the real world hate her and find her oppressive?
It felt like we had to give the counterargument to Barbie, and not give it short shrift, but give it real intellectual and emotional power. And Mattel was incredibly open to it. I said, “We have to explore it, because it’s a lie any other way. And we can’t make it a lie.” I think they heard it.
The feminism in this film comes out so naturally, just by placing Barbie and Ken in the real world. It starts the moment they arrive in Venice Beach. Ken feels that people are suddenly looking at him with respect, and Barbie doesn’t have the words for it, but she feels she’s being objectified. Did that flow out as naturally as it seems?
I think of the film as humanist above anything else. How Barbie operates in Barbieland is she’s entirely continuous with her environment. Even the houses have no walls, because you never need to hide because there’s nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed of. And suddenly finding yourself in the real world and wishing you could hide, that’s the essence of being human. But when we were actually shooting on Venice Beach, with Margot and Ryan in neon rollerblading outfits, it was fascinating because it was actually happening in front of us. People would go by Ryan, high-five him, and say, “Awesome, Ryan, you look great!” And they wouldn’t actually say anything to Margot. They’d just look at her. It was just surreal. In that moment, she did feel self-conscious. And as the director, I wanted to protect her. But I also knew that the scene we were shooting had to be the scene where she felt exposed. And she was exposed, both as a celebrity and as a lady. To be fair, Ryan was like, “I wish I wasn’t wearing this vest.” [Laughs.] But it was a different kind of discomfort.
When I hear you use the word “humanist,” I feel like I need to gently push back on behalf of the fans who are going to love this movie and perceive its message as unabashedly feminist.
Of course, I am a feminist. But this movie is also dealing with [the idea that] any kind of hierarchical power structure that moves in any direction isn’t so great. You go to Mattel and it is really like, “Oh, Barbie has been president since 1991. Barbie had gone to the moon before women could get credit cards.” We kind of extrapolated out from that that Barbieland is this reversed world [where Barbies rule and Kens are an underclass]. The reverse structure of whatever Barbieland is, is almost like Planet of the Apes. You can see how unfair this is for the Kens because it’s totally unsustainable.
Now that you’ve entered this world of big franchises, how will you balance your directing career going forward, between huge commercial films and smaller ones?
I think probably every director has a fantasy baseball league in their head of what movies they want to make. And there’s some movies I’d like to make that require a big canvas. At the same time, I’ve seen so many directors move between bigger movies and smaller movies: Chloé Zhao doing Nomadland and making Eternals. Or Steven Soderbergh, or even my weekend buddy Chris Nolan. He made the Dark Knight trilogy — and they’re wonderful — and then made The Prestige, which is not a tiny movie, but it is also not the same thing. I want to play in lots of different worlds. That’s the goal.
There’s footage out there of you directing the garden scene in Lady Bird, and you seem so joyous. It feels like you love being a director.
I love it so much. I love every part of making a movie, soup to nuts. And Margot is the same way. For us, it’s Disneyland every day. I honestly can’t believe I get to do this”.
I already sourced this interview for a recent feature regarding comedies and how the very best and most ambitious of this year have been made by female directors and screenwriters. I want to come back to The Guardian’s interview with Greta Gerwig, as we discover new sides to the director and writer. She seems like a joy to speak to! It is almost a shame that the Barbie excitement and build will die not long after the film comes out on 21st July:
“Gerwig was invited to write Barbie by the actor Margot Robbie who, with Warner Bros, had bought the rights to the film. (Robbie stars in Barbie as Barbie.) Gerwig has said she was terrified to accept the job. “It’s not like a superhero, who already has a story. It felt very much like it was going to be an adaptation. Except what we were adapting is a doll – an icon of the 20th century.” Before writing the script, Gerwig thought: “It felt complicated enough, sticky enough, strange enough, that maybe there could be something interesting there to be discovered.” She didn’t know she was going to direct the film until after the script was written. “I kind of had two thoughts: I love this and I can’t bear it if anyone else makes it. And: they’ll never let us make this movie.”
To pitch Barbie to executives, Gerwig wrote a poem so strange and “surreal” that she will not read it to me now. When I ask what it concerned, she says, “Oh, you know, the lament of Job?” before adding, “Shockingly, it does actually communicate some vibe of the movie.” Gerwig wrote Barbie with her partner, the filmmaker Noah Baumbach, though for a while she didn’t tell him she’d enlisted his help. (“He was like, ‘Did you sign us up to write a Barbie movie?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, Noah, get excited!’”) They worked on the script during the pandemic, when doubt plagued the future of the communal cinema experience.
“There was this sense of wanting to make something anarchic and wild and completely bananas,” Gerwig says, “because it felt, like, ‘Well, if we ever do get to go back to cinemas again, let’s do something totally unhinged.’” The anarchy of Gerwig’s Barbie comes from “the deep isolation of the pandemic,” she says – “that feeling of being in our own little boxes, alone.”
Barbie was conceived in 1959, by Ruth Handler, who co-founded the doll’s manufacturer Mattel. Barbie has since occupied a complicated position in the lives of her owners. On one hand, she has been terrible for girls’ body image, a fact Gerwig acknowledges playfully in the film’s opening 20 minutes. (On discovering Barbie’s flat feet, several other Barbies, and at least one Ken, heave mawkishly and knowingly in disgust.) But according to fans she has empowered, too. In more recent times, Mattel has produced dolls with different skin colours and in different shapes. While researching Barbie, Gerwig toured the company’s headquarters. “The kind of amazing thing is that Barbie went to the moon before women had the ability to get credit cards,” she says. “That’s crazy. She was always a kind of step ahead.”
At Mattel, Gerwig saw an image of an all-female Barbie presidential ticket. “I was like, ‘Huh, so Barbie’s done it, but we haven’t?” (The first presidential Barbie appeared in 1992; in the film, president Barbie is played by Issa Rae.) Gerwig was fascinated. “As an icon, she’s always been complicated,” she says. “She has always had these two sides to her.”
Growing up, Gerwig had a tangled relationship with the doll. “I was always intrigued,” she says, because, “Barbie was, if not exactly forbidden in our house, well, it was not encouraged.” Why not? “Oh, the usual criticisms. ‘If she was a real woman, she wouldn’t even be able to stand up; she wouldn’t be able to support her head.’ My mum was a child of the 60s. She was like, ‘We got this far, for this?’” Eventually, Gerwig’s mother relented. “She got me my own,” Gerwig recalls. “Fresh out the box.” It replaced the neighbourhood hand-me-downs she had been playing with.
But Gerwig already had a strong connection to other dolls, the kind you mother, and she had a vivid imagination. “I played with dolls until… I don’t want to say too late, but I played with them long enough that I didn’t want kids at school to know I still played with them. I was a teenager. I was about 13 and still playing with dolls. And I knew that kids at that point were already kissing.” She smiles. “I was a late bloomer.”
Gerwig has said that Barbie’s story mimics that of a girl’s journey from childhood to adolescence. “I always think that 8, 9, 10 years old is peak kid. I was brash and unafraid and loud and big. And then, you know…” Puberty. “It’s a shrinking. Wanting to make yourself smaller, less noticeable, take in all that spikiness and bury it. And you’re profoundly uncomfortable, because you’re going through metamorphosis, literally.” You begin to introspect. “But also, you’re getting tall. You’re getting your period. You get spots.” Gerwig describes childhood as being at peace with the world and adolescence as being suddenly not. “My experience of it was wanting to hide.”
I ask, “Is the film about growing up?”
“It’s not about growing up, exactly,” she says. “But in a way… This is about Barbie, an inanimate doll made out of plastic. But the movie ends up, really, about being human”.
In many ways, the themes in Barbie chime with those Gerwig has tackled previously, not least in Lady Bird, her loosely autobiographical directorial debut, and a 2019 adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott novel, Little Women, which the critic Anthony Lane said, “may just be the best film yet made by an American woman”. Both films star Saoirse Ronan and feature adolescent women becoming new, more complicated versions of themselves. Gerwig was nominated for best director at the Oscars for Lady Bird – she became only the fifth female director to be nominated for the award. If Lady Bird announced Gerwig as a top-tier filmmaker, Little Women confirmed it. Plaudits followed. Hollywood invited her in. But Barbie is different altogether: bigger budget, bigger anticipation – what might be the first true summer blockbuster, post-pandemic. When I ask Gerwig how she feels about the film’s release, she says, “I’m just so nervous. I’m so nervous. I’m excited! But I’m so nervous.” And then: “I just can’t believe, like, here it is… Let’s go!”.
Again, I will source an interview that I have used before. Vogue spent some time in Margot Robbie’s company. Getting to the heart of the film and the actor, it is wonderful interview with some fantastic photos. One reason I wanted to revisit these interviews is because there is so much detail and some incredible images! It is always captivating and wonderful when you get these immersive and thoroughly in-depth interviews. I have selected parts from the Vogue interview to highlight:
“LuckyChap wanted Gerwig and Baumbach to have full creative freedom. “At the same time,” Robbie says, “we’ve got two very nervous ginormous companies, Warner Bros. and Mattel, being like: What’s their plan? What are they going to do? What’s it gonna be about? What’s she going to say? They have a bazillion questions.” In the end LuckyChap found a way to structure a deal so that Gerwig and Baumbach would be left alone to write what they wanted, “which was really fucking hard to do.”
Gerwig and Baumbach did share a treatment, Robbie adds: “Greta wrote an abstract poem about Barbie. And when I say ‘abstract,’ I mean it was super abstract.” (Gerwig declines to read me the poem but offers that it “shares some similarities with the Apostles’ Creed.”) No one at LuckyChap, Mattel, or Warner Bros. saw any pages of the script until it was finished.
IN THIS PHOTO: Margot Robbie photographed by Ethan James Green for Vogue, summer 2023
When I ask Gerwig and Baumbach to describe their Barbie writing process, the words “open” and “free” get used a lot. The project seemed “wide open,” Gerwig tells me. “There really was this kind of open, free road that we could keep building,” Baumbach says. Part of it had to do with the fact that their characters were dolls. “It’s like you’re playing with dolls when you’re writing something, and in this case, of course, there was this extra layer in that they were dolls,” Baumbach says. “It was literally imaginative play,” Gerwig says. That they were writing the script during lockdown also mattered, Baumbach says. “We were in the pandemic, and everybody had the feeling of, Who knows what the world is going to look like. That fueled it as well. That feeling of: Well, here goes nothing.”
Robbie and Ackerley read the Barbie script at the same time. A certain joke on page one sent their jaws to the floor. “We just looked at each other, pure panic on our faces,” Robbie recalls. “We were like, Holy fucking shit.” When Robbie finished reading: “I think the first thing I said to Tom was, This is so genius. It is such a shame that we’re never going to be able to make this movie.”
IN THIS PHOTO: Margot Robbie photographed by Ethan James Green for Vogue, summer 2023
LuckyChap did make the movie, of course, and it’s very much the one Gerwig and Baumbach wrote. (Alas, that joke on page one is gone.) If you saw the trailer released in December, you’ve seen the opening of the film. It’s a parody of the Dawn of Man sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But instead of apes discovering tools in the presence of a monolith, little girls smash their baby dolls in the presence of a gigantic Barbie. Robbie-as-Barbie appears in a retro black-and-white bathing suit and towering heels. She slowly lowers a pair of white cat-eye sunglasses and winks.
I saw more of the movie one morning at the Warner Bros. lot. After the Kubrick spoof we go on a romp through Barbieland, “a mad fantasy of gorgeousness,” as Sarah Greenwood, the film’s set designer, puts it later. Barbie wakes up in her Dreamhouse and embarks on the Perfect Day, accompanied by an original song that serves as soundtrack. (I am not allowed to say who sings it.) Everything everywhere is infused with pink. “I’ve never done such a deep dive into pink in all my days,” Greenwood says. Barbie’s perfectly fake, color-saturated world retains many of the quirks and physical limitations of the toy version. Her environment isn’t always three-dimensional, and the scale of everything is a bit off. Barbie is a little too big for her house and her car. When she takes a shower, there is no water. Her bare feet remain arched.
IN THIS PHOTO: Margot Robbie photographed by Ethan James Green for Vogue, summer 2023
Stereotypical Barbie was a tough nut to crack. Usually Robbie finds something called “animal work” helpful. Tonya was a pit bull in life and a mustang on the ice. Nellie, Robbie’s character in Babylon, was an octopus and a honey badger. An octopus because they are survivalists; they have a lot of nerve endings; there’s a fluidity to them; and they change their appearance. A honey badger because they have square backs and thick skin. “They’re such an insane animal,” Robbie says. “You can hit a honey badger with a machete.” With Barbie, animal work wasn’t useful. Robbie tried a flamingo but didn’t get anywhere. At one point she was really struggling. “I was like, Greta, I need to go on this whole character journey. And Greta was like, Oh, I have a really good podcast for you.” Gerwig sent Robbie an episode of This American Life, about a woman who doesn’t introspect. “You know how you have a voice in your head all the time?” Robbie says. “This woman, she doesn’t have that voice in her head.”
To sort out the sexiness question, Robbie had to break it down. “I’m like, Okay, she’s a doll. She’s a plastic doll. She doesn’t have organs. If she doesn’t have organs, she doesn’t have reproductive organs. If she doesn’t have reproductive organs, would she even feel sexual desire? No, I don’t think she could.” Therefore: “She is sexualized. But she should never be sexy. People can project sex onto her.” Thus: “Yes, she can wear a short skirt, but because it’s fun and pink. Not because she wanted you to see her butt.”
I do glean a few details about the rest of Barbie. The arc is partially inspired by something Gerwig read when she was a kid, in the 1994 bestseller Reviving Ophelia. “My mom would check out books from the library about parenting, and then I would read them,” Gerwig says. The book describes an abrupt change that happens in American girls when they hit adolescence and begin to bend to external expectations. “They’re funny and brash and confident, and then they just—stop,” Gerwig says. This memory bubbled up early in the writing and Gerwig found it “jarring,” the realization that this is where the story had to go: “How is this journey the same thing that a teenage girl feels? All of a sudden, she thinks, Oh, I’m not good enough.” There’s a completely different color template for the real world, Prieto mentions when we speak. Techni-Barbie is only for Barbie’s world. “We wanted to create a distinctive look for Barbie, for her world, as opposed to the real world,” Prieto says.
Also, Robbie’s speech patterns change. She brings this up when describing Barbie’s non-accent. (Barbie shouldn’t sound like she’s from anywhere in particular, therefore: “General American accent. It’s called GenAm.”) At the start of the movie, Barbie speaks in a higher register, and: “Everything is very definite. There’s no second thought. There’s no hesitation.” Later, her voice lowers, and there are more pauses”.
I am going to finish with a review for Barbie. Go and see it if you get the opportunity. It comes out on 21st July. The official site is here. That will give you more details regarding its social media channels and all the information that you need. No doubt this is going to be the cinematic event of the year! The reviews that have come out already are hugely positive. I literally don’t think there will be anything less than five and four-star reviews from across the board. It is going to be impossible to find much fault with a film that will delight and blow the senses. In fact, rather than hunting a single review, let’s get a selection of opinions. Variety presented a selection of the opinions about the superb Barbie:
“A select few humans got a glimpse into Barbie World on Sunday night at the world premiere of Greta Gerwig’s highly anticipated “Barbie,” starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.
Social media exploded with reactions. ScreenRant writer Joseph Deckelmeier called the film “funny, bombastic and very smart,” adding that “Greta Gerwig aims for the fences and hits a home run.” Deckelmeier praised Robbie’s performance as “great” and noted that Gosling and Simu Liu are “pure entertainment.”
Collider writer Perri Nemiroff praised the craftsmanship of the film, particularly the costume and production design. When it came to the story, however, she had more mixed opinions, stating: “I think the film serves Margot Robbie’s Barbie and her journey especially well, but there are other characters experiencing important arcs that needed more screen time to really dig into and explore to the fullest.”
Jamie Jirak of ComicBook.com called the film her “favorite film of the year,” writing: “Greta Gerwig somehow exceeded my expectations…Give Ryan Gosling an Oscar nomination, I’m dead serious!”
“Pay Or Wait” host Sharronda Williams called the film “witty, heartfelt and downright fun,” particularly complimenting Gosling as a “scene stealer delivering most of the laughs.” Williams also stated that the screenplay “feels bloated at times.”
Variety‘s social media editor Katcy Stephan called the movie “perfection”: “Greta Gerwig delivers a nuanced commentary on what it means to be a woman in a whimsical, wonderful and laugh-out-loud funny romp. The entire cast shines, especially Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling in roles they were clearly born to play”.
A film that everyone will need to go and see, I wanted to have a look at some of the promotion around Barbie. I wanted to especially highlight Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie. I think that Ryan Gosling is fantastic and he may well get a lot of award buzz for his role as Ken. He is a natural comic actor and I hope he pairs with Robbie again soon, as the two have this instant chemistry and clear affection for one another. It is the command and star quality if Margot Robbie that she brings to the role of Barbie. Directed by the phenomenal Greta Gerwig, it sounds like it was a really fun and exciting set to be a part of! With a terrific soundtrack accompanying the film on 21st July, the marketing has been brilliant. One of the best campaigns in living memory. Not that this alone will make the film a spectacular success. It will pull hundred of millions of dollars/pounds in the box office and, as I have predicted, earn awards for Robbie, Gerwig and probably Gosling too! On 21st July, so many of us will be spending time immersed in Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography and Greta Gerwig’s fine direction. Stepping into Barbie Land. This film has brought people together and created so much conversation – not just around the film and a series of films based around Mattel figures, but also feminism and reappropriating Barbie and her impact. It has most definitely left us all…
IN the pink.