‘Barbie’ filmmaker Greta Gerwig wants to embrace the mess

Barbie, the doll, may be 64 years old, but Barbie, the movie, is a pandemic baby.

Greta Gerwig, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind Little Women and Lady Bird, started dreaming it up at a time when she wasn't sure movies would ever come back.

“I wanted to channel something that had that ache in it, but also something so wild and unruly and something that was so just spilling out over the edges of it that you want to be in a group and see it big,” Gerwig said last week. "Because I thought we’ll never make any movies again, but if they’re going to, I’d like this.”

Her Barbie, released on July 21 in the US and other countries, is a joyful, maximalist, deeply weird, insightful and defiantly pink confection starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. She co-wrote it with her partner, Noah Baumbach, with whom she shares two sons — a toddler and a five-month-old whom they welcomed into the world while getting Barbie out to the world.

Gerwig spoke to the AP this week about the film, the reviews, the tension between art and commerce, and the unlikely connection between Barbie and Oppenheimer. (Hint: It’s not just the release date.)

Remarks have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Reviews for Barbie came out (Wednesday) and are very positive. I’m wondering if you engage with those and how you’re feeling?

I do. I mean, of course. I’m not Emily Dickinson. I’m not above anything. I didn’t actually look last night because I just knew I would be too anxious. I was like go to sleep, wake up, caffeinate, get your kid to summer camp and then find out where we are. There’s a lot of reviewers that I really respect and have really liked. Film criticism matters to me as a person and also being in conversation with people who think about cinema matters. But it can feel very scary at the moment that you’re at the emotional pitch of releasing a movie to take it in.

What I tend to do is know which ones I’m going to go back to in a few weeks when I can take it in more. It’s too overwhelming at the moment. All my metaphors go to giving birth because I have a five-month-old but it would be like if you just give birth and then you’re like, “What are the reviews of the baby?” But I did check the email and I’m pleased. Barbie seems to have been received in the spirit that it was meant, which is exciting.

We read that you called Peter Weir (The Truman Show director) to get advice on creating an artificial world with emotional authenticity. Is there anything he told you that you can share?

He was so generous getting on the phone with me. I had this idea of making Barbie Land basically an interior soundstage world. That was the concept. But as big as soundstages are, they’re not the world. They’re going to be small. You can only hang the lights so high.

There's obviously parts of his movie that are done on a stage, but then there are other parts of it that can’t possibly be on a stage because it’s too big, but it feels like it’s on a stage, you know? Why does it feel like it’s on a stage? He explained to me they did shoot a lot of it outside in this community in Florida, but that they hung big stage lighting everywhere so it would look lit even though it was outside. And then he said it made everything like 120 degrees and that he did not suggest that. He was like I wouldn’t do that. It works but you might want to avoid making a place that’s hot, hotter.

That's great that you asked...

In my experience, directors are so generous speaking about what they’ve done and how they did it and what were the problems, because you’re only ever on your own movie AND movies are hard and they always feel completely unlikely and completely impossible but in a new way that the other one wasn’t. Whatever lessons you learned on the last one, you can apply some of them, but it’s going to be a new set of issues. And other directors want to give you the knowledge that they’ve gotten that they can’t use anymore because they’ve already made that movie.

I had the same experience when I was making Little Women. Steven Spielberg was incredibly generous with me because he had made Lincoln, which took place in the same year. He opened up all of his research, all the lighting diagrams that he did with his cinematographer. He was like here’s how we did it. He just showed me absolutely everything. Even though you’re only ever in your own dream of your own movie, there’s camaraderie in the loneliness.

We wondered going in if Barbie was going to be for kids, but then about 15 minutes in we realized that this is exactly the type of movie that we wish we’d had to obsess over at age 8 instead of, like Grease 2.

I’ve never thought of such a sharp delineation of like what’s for kids and for adults. I just don’t see it as church and state. There’s this Demetri Martin joke that’s like, saying you like kids is like saying, “I like people, for a little while.” We all have some sense of childhood and sense of moving out of it, too, which I think is something that I probably will be forever interested in. We’re not Merlin. We only live in one direction.

There’s talk of a Proust Barbie in the film, which doesn’t seem random. Could you elaborate on why you chose him?

In Remembrance of Things Past, in Swann’s Way, he is literally thrown back into his childhood through the taste of the madeleine. I thought, well, that’ll be a nice Easter egg for one person.

Proust was Oppenheimer’s favorite too. I did not expect that to be the connection between these movies.

So he would have loved Proust Barbie!

• Watch: 'Barbie' dolls are back in business after movie revives interest