‘Barbie’ Director Greta Gerwig Discusses the Film’s Blockbuster Opening
The thing I keep hearing from people in Hollywood is “I don’t know how she got away with it.” When a theatrically released movie is made at this budget level, anything idiosyncratic or challenging often gets whittled down by studio notes. How were you able to preserve your sensibility the whole way through this process?
I was originally meant to just write it with Noah, and then we finished the script and that was the thing that made me want to direct it. It felt so clear to me: If they didn’t want to make that [version], I didn’t need to make it. Margot, as the producer and star, was really the first person to line up and say, “I want to do it her way.” And then as we started adding collaborators and gathering more cast, suddenly there was a large number of people who were excited to do something that was this, excuse the pun, out of the box.
Part of me thinks that because it was all so idiosyncratic and so wild, it was almost like no one really knew where to start taking it apart. Like, where are you going to start hacking away at how strange it was? Maybe because there was this sense of sheer joy behind it, it was this hard thing to say, “Oh no, we don’t want that thing that’s sheer joy.” People wanted it to exist, in all its weirdness.
Even the movie’s inciting incident is pretty heady. I’m trying to imagine how the executives reacted when you told them, “Well, things really kick off when Barbie starts having irrepressible thoughts of death.”
I know! We had the idea of the movie starting off like this whirligig, and that line becomes something where she almost breaks the movie. And what do you do after you’ve broken the movie? Her character tries to just keep the movie going normally again, but there’s no way to do it. But yeah, I don’t know that anyone totally knew what the tone of this was going to be until it was all done. I mean, within the group of people who were deeply making it, we knew, but it was truly an act of faith for everyone else.
Source: The New York Times
