Plastic fantastic
GRETA GERWIG’S BARBIE BLEW EVERY OTHER BLOCKBUSTER AWAY THIS SUMMER. SHE REFLECTS ON ITS GROUNDBREAKING SUCCESS AND WILDEST CREATIVE SWINGS
WORDS BEN TRAVIS
JANUARY 2024 | EDITED BY CHRIS HEWITT
TALK ABOUT PAINTING the town pink. When Barbie landed this summer, cinemas were flooded with fuchsia-clad film fans, strapping in for a riotously rule-breaking comedy that belied its origins as a toy-doll movie. That’s what you get when you hand the Dreamhouse keys over to a filmmaker as unique as Greta Gerwig — someone who both revelled in Barbie’s high-gloss surface, while daring to make a film that probed behind it to tap into deep emotions and unexpected existential questions. With prog-rock dance-battles.
Fresh from conquering the box office with 2023’s biggest film ($1.4 billion and counting), Gerwig sat down with Empire to reflect on her experience at the eye of the storm, her boldest creative decisions, and what Barbie means for the future — both hers, and Hollywood’s.
What is it like for you, months after release, to still be in the world of Barbie?
It’s truly wonderful that it resonated the way it did, and that people saw it in packed cinemas. Noah Baumbach and I were writing it in the middle of lockdown. There was no communal experience of being in a movie theatre together in the dark, and laughing, and feeling joy, and maybe crying together. It was something that I wanted so badly. This film... first of all, we thought nobody would ever let us make it. [Laughs] But it was almost like building our own portal to the future, when people were together — using the movie to conjure togetherness in a movie theatre. Being able to now talk about it from the perspective of that experience having happened, and still be happening, is just wonderful.
It’s such a bold film, not at all a typical big studio comedy blockbuster. There must have been a feeling while you were making it of, “Am I getting away with this? Can I get away with this?”