How can you make a story about a ubiquitous plastic doll worth telling? What if I suffered an existential crisis? How are the risks increased for the making of the film? What if its producer and star also suffered a crisis?
“I have a clear memory of Margot coming to my house before we started filming and having a little acting crisis: 'How am I going to do this?' “It's the acting equivalent of facing a blank page,” says “Barbie” director and co-writer Greta Gerwig of a defining moment on the project with Margot Robbie.
Gerwig understood the problem. It was difficult to get traction when trying to embody a character who starts out in a state of wonderful perfection. As the story begins, Barbie is living a frictionless life in the pink perfection of Barbie Land.
“This sounds so crazy, but every day I kept thinking about… Oh, God, I'm going to sound really upset right now, but here we go: 'Paradise Lost' by Milton… Stay with me,” Gerwig insists: “it's about Eden. The first part of the poem is The Eden Before the Fall, which is not irrelevant to the world we were trying to create in Barbie Land. There is no shame, there is no aging, there is no death, there is no pain. And then it becomes something that doesn't [have those things]. But in that Eden there is no separation between the self and the environment.
“Then there is no poetry, because there is no metaphor. What good would metaphor do if everything is literally what it is? So, after The Fall, although it is terrible, in a way, poetry emerges, because that is what happens when there is a distance between oneself and the environment and there is an inner life and there is a soul.”
Yes, we are still talking about “Barbie.”
Milton's 'Paradise Lost'… is not irrelevant to the world we were trying to create in Barbie Land.
— Greta Gerwig, director and co-writer of “Barbie”
“What I saw Margot do with this performance was find that innocence that had no poetry and then allow a soul that needed it to appear,” Gerwig continues. “And it happened every day, every day. And I think it was such a human arc, because, God, do we all know the desperation of desperately trying to put together what's falling apart in front of us, that we do it throughout our lives all the time?
“The panic was palpable and debilitating,” Margot Robbie says of her headspace before taking on her role as Barbie. “There's nothing here to hold on to, because she doesn't have childhood trauma and she doesn't have all those things that she normally holds on to and then builds on.”
(Evan Mulling / for The Times)
Robbie takes a moment during his portion of this video conference, smiles, and says, “The kind of direction I would get every day is this.”
And it happened, says Robbie, who also produced the film, as its writer-director describes it: “I went to Greta's house and had that crisis. I spent years trying to make this movie work. And suddenly we're going to shoot that thing. And I was like, 'Oh my God, I don't know how to do this.' It happens before every movie I've ever done. A few weeks later, I have a crisis where I think: 'What am I doing? I don't know how to act. Everyone will suddenly realize that I can't do any of this and it will be terrible. And then it's pure panic. So yeah, I went to Greta's house. The panic was palpable and debilitating. “I don't know how to apply any of this research that I've done, and I've done all the things, and I still don't know who she is.”
“It was very difficult, because I was trying to pick up something that had nothing to hold on to. It was like when you only have one grape left on your plate and you're trying to pick it up with your fork and I tell you: 'I can't pick you up.' There's nothing here to hold on to, because she doesn't have childhood trauma and she doesn't have all those things that she normally holds on to and then builds on. She doesn't have any of that and I couldn't get her. And then Greta helped me through that and pointed me in all the right directions, and we talked about it.”
Robbie had another advantage, perhaps a silent companion to help her get on track: the wordless opening sequence.
“The first week was almost like a silent movie, because we were doing the whole sequence of the day he woke up,” Gerwig says. “And it was this kind of beautiful dance that we were doing that had no words. And I don't know any other way to describe it: she was just there. Barbie was there.”
“We take every part of what [Ken] “She's serious about it, even to the point of listening to a hymn, and she's on her own journey of self-discovery,” says Greta Gerwig of the character played by Ryan Gosling.
(Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros.)
“What Margot does in her performance is incredible because it seems so effortless,” Gerwig continues. “But what it really is is a self that has no inner life, no doubts or questions. And that self is not vapid. It's just literal. Then that self falls apart in front of us and she desperately tries to put it back together. And the more she puts it back together, the more we see the ghost in the machine. “It's like a magic show.”
Robbie thanks Gerwig for sending him an episode of “This American Life” “about the woman who doesn't introspect; that was a great help. I started movies about a big fight scene or a car accident. But diving into blank perfection was strangely difficult.”
Robbie's career is notable not only for some of his best-known films (“The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” “Suicide Squad,” among them), but because, as soon as Since she had some power in the industry, she took the reins. She and her partners formed LuckyChap Entertainment, a production company charged with promoting the works of filmmakers as part of its mission statement, whether they star Robbie (the Oscar winner “I, Tonya”) or not (the Oscar winner “ Promising Young Woman” and the very lively “Saltburn”). So what made embodying a plastic toy the next logical product for her company?
“This doll has been a vessel for many things over the years. And I think beyond the obvious opportunity to reach a lot of people because of Barbie's global recognition, knowing how controversial she's been over the decades, she's been controversial when society had totally different temperatures, which is really interesting. ”says Robbie. . “One thing I realized when we made 'I, Tonya' is that everyone had already decided how they felt about our leading lady before sitting down to watch the movie, for the most part. It was a really interesting place to start a journey with an audience and have a familiar protagonist and also someone who maybe makes people feel conflicted.
“'Oh, I felt this a lot about her when I was younger, and now I feel this a lot about her when she's older. Or, 'I read these articles as I was growing up'… There are so many feelings and points of view wrapped up in it, but it's all connected to you and your stage of life, and that just adds an extra layer of emotion. investment, I think, of an audience. So that was exciting. It also felt really scary. It seemed very evident that there were many ways to do this wrong.”
“It really was a miracle to get this done and do it the way we wanted,” Margot Robbie says of “Barbie,” a film she produced.
(Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros. Pictures)
Audiences were deeply invested in “Barbie.” With a record gross of $1.4 billion worldwide, the film also had an impact on film academia. Among its eight Oscar nominations last month were one for best picture and another for Gerwig and Noah Baumbach for their screenplay. Still, acting and directing nominations for Robbie and Gerwig were not among the announcements.
Much has been written about whether those omissions were snubs that simply demonstrated the film's candy-colored feminist stance that women are still not as empowered as men or whether the director category has an unspoken limit for female nominees (Justine Triet , director of “Anatomy of a Fall,” received a nomination). But, many asked, how is it possible that a film that won the box office, helped revive movie attendance and earned critical acclaim, like “Oppenheimer,” the other half of the “Barbenheimer” summer equation that earned those nominations, didn't get enough votes for its director?
In another conversation, Robbie seemed optimistic about the question.
“We set out to make a film that would break cultural norms, bring audiences together, entertain them and engage them on a deeply emotional level. To have been able to do that at this scale and magnitude and have this film resonate the way it did is truly beyond our wildest imagination and is our greatest reward.
“As a producer and its actress, would I have loved to see Greta nominated for directing? Of course. But she became the first director to have her first three solo directorial efforts nominated for best picture, which is pretty historic. She cracked the code of this film, as only she could. It's such a unique vision, and Greta brought so much humanity, creativity, inspiration, magic and joy to 'Barbie.' And it is thanks to her that we have all received so many compliments.”
And perhaps, Robbie wonders, the level of difficulty involved in the production simply wasn't evident.
“Everyone feels like, oh, this was a sure thing from the beginning, all you had to do was do a little paperwork, get started, boom, you have a hit. And it really wasn't the case. It was such, I mean, it was really a miracle to even get this done and do it the way we wanted to do it. And that the Greta and Noah script is the version of this movie, I still can't believe it was made,” says Robbie.
“There were a million terrible [possible] Barbie movies and maybe a perfect one, and it was such a small goal that it was exciting to go after it and hope that we could actually reach that tiny goal. And I felt like if we could, it would be really impactful. And I'm so happy that it was, I would say that's mainly why we pursued it. “I didn't really think about it as an actor until a couple of years into the process.”
There were a million terrible [possible] Barbie movies and maybe a perfect one.
— Margot Robbie, producer and lead actress of “Barbie”
The final product is a film that is not only overtly feminist, but essentially humanist. Ken, for all his scheming for the doll revolution, is not actually a villain. He is a frustrated naïve trying to gain agency, to discover himself. Of course, his glimpse of a patriarchal world once he enters the real world of Los Angeles with Barbie would spark ambitions for a “better” world for him and his siblings. That doesn't excuse his insurrection, but it doesn't make him a black-and-white evildoer, as some have claimed the film does with the men.
“We take their plight seriously. We take every part of what he goes through seriously, even to the point where they sing him a hymn and he's on his own journey of self-discovery,” says Gerwig. “And I think one thing Ryan brought was a certain degree of empathy. And what we always said is, yeah, it's funny. Yes, there are things that are complex and have many places that can be uncomfortable, but there is not a single villain in the film and there is no one who does not deserve our sympathy or our empathy.
In the end, the film says, we are all Kenough.
