It's Greta's World... The Director Talks Boiler Suits, New Babies, And Barbie-Mania

This article was originally published in July 2023

In a suite in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, Greta Gerwig’s phone rings. ‘Sail away, sail away, sail away,’ it warbles, over familiar strings. ‘Oh no. Sorry,’ says Gerwig, springing up from her chair, as the song keeps on blaring until the she can find it. ‘My ringtone is Enya,’ she says, having eventually silenced the ring tone. ‘Because phones ringing are anxious. And Enya is wonderful.’

That Gerwig would try to self-soothe with late-80s Irish synth pop during the most high-pressure moment of her career is understandable. Because it’s safe to say that she has a lot on when we meet, having only recently finished the Barbie movie she has directed and co-written. The pre-release buzz for the film has been extraordinary; every scrap of gossip, every leaked paparazzi photo of its stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, as Barbie and Ken, rollerblading in neon kneepads has been a viral moment. On TikTok, the BarbieTheMovie hashtag has a cool 991.5m views.

Gerwig’s involvement has intrigued pop culture geeks from the start: her fans would not have had a Barbie blockbuster on their bingo card. She is known for naturalistic, indie-skewing movies, starring in Greenberg (2010) with Ben Stiller and acting in and co-writing Frances Ha (2012), both of which capitalised on her whimsical, relatable, charisma. She later directed Lady Bird (2017), which was partly inspired by her childhood in Sacramento, California, and a 2019 adaptation of Little Women, both of which were Oscar nominated.

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Growing up, she says, ‘My mom wasn’t crazy about Barbie. It wasn’t something that felt, necessarily, approved, which made it more intriguing.’ Her family didn’t have a TV, she wasn’t allowed to wear logos: this was not a world of Barbie Dream House-style all-American consumerism. ‘Part of the reason I think I was so intrigued [by this project],’ she says, ‘is because, not even intellectually, but from deep inside, I understand the counter-arguments. That feels rich.’

She hopes the film subverts sexist stereotypes. Barbie, she says, is, ‘literally plastic. She’s unchanging. If you threw her out, she just wouldn't disintegrate. If I could give that persona some humanity, some falling-apart-ness, that – in and of itself – would be be meaningful.’ Also, ‘In this sort of double mirror of the movie, Margot Robbie is also a person we expect to be perfect. What does that mean that we also do that? Is she allowed to fall apart and be vulnerable?’

It was Robbie, the film's producer, who initially brought Gerwig on board as a writer. Gerwig said she would do it if her partner, Noah Baumbach, came too; she fell in love with the finished script and put herself forward to direct it.

‘Even though it's about Barbie, it felt incredibly personal. Just as personal as anything else I've made,’ she says. Plot details are closely guarded, but we do know there are multiple refreshingly diverse Barbies living in a perfect world that Robbie’s Barbie comes to suspect may not be real, when her permanently arched feet fall flat and she worries about dying. (Close ups of Robbie-as-Barbie’s perpetual tip toes went viral earlier this year; those feet, ‘are like a bat signal,’ says Gerwig).

‘It starts off in a place where there is no aging, no death, no shame, no separation. That’s an oldie but a goodie. Because I went to Catholic school, that story of Eve and Adam suddenly realising they are naked really stuck with me,’ she says. She talks about John Milton's Paradise Lost, and the idea that there is no poetry without pain, one of many perhaps unexpected references — including Vincent Minelli’s An American in Paris, Jacques Tati's Mon Uncle and Powell and Pressburger’s Stairway to Heaven — she has brought to the project.

As a director, Gerwig likes to foster a sense of security on set. 'Like you all step into the same shared dream,' she says. (‘If you're an asshole on a Greta Gerwig set, there's no hope for you,’ says the actor Simu Liu, who plays one of the Kens.) Hence the Barbie-themed sleepover before filming, where at least twelve Barbies plus America Ferrera (at the time of writing, Ferrera’s character is yet to be revealed) hung out; the Kens briefly popped over to play parlour games. Gerwig also encouraged the cast to bring their families to set. At one point, Ryan Gosling was chatting with her mum. ‘She just got right in there. He was like: “Your mom’s amazing.”’

She feels very much ‘in the middle everything’ in life, not least because she has just had a second baby (she also has a four-year-old son, Harold, and a stepson, who is 13). She retires to a private room to pump a bottle of breast milk, which is handed to her assistant, between the shoot and the interview. ‘I’m about to be 40,’ she says. ‘And there’s something about that where you’re like: Oh! I’m properly middle aged now.’ All parts of life feel extremely activated.’ She shows me a picture of her baby on her lap, at his four-month checkup the previous day. ‘He’s a little Schmoo. I don’t know if you can tell energy from the picture, but that’s very much his energy. He’s a wise little baby.’

She is incredibly upbeat and eloquent, which is all the more impressive when I learn that she isn’t sleeping much. ‘The little guy is sleeping through the night. But I'm still doing that thing where I wake up, every hour to 90 minutes, and just hover. You just keep wanting to look at that baby. So I'm slightly in a twilight state,’ she says. But you would never know she needs a nap as she talks me through her favourite designers (she loves the Rodarte sisters, Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen, and she discovered Margaret Howell in London: ‘That stuff is primo!’) and her fear of department stores (‘I get overwhelmed because there's so much glass - too much reflective surface!’)

On the Barbie set she wore the same boiler suit, in different colours, every day; she has long been a ‘uniform-seeker’. Now, she says, as she approaches her forties, ‘I want to start being more playfully outrageous.’ She talks about how fun it was to wear long nails and high heels for our shoot. ‘I don’t want to be 80 and look back and say I could have really done it, from 40 to 60, but I chose to be practical! But we will see how far I get with this,’ she says. Either way, it feels as though she is grabbing the current moment with both hands. ‘I'll probably look back and say, “That was a really an amazing time. And I don't know how all of it was possible.” But it’s filled with a lot of happiness.’

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