‘Barbie’ film ‘looks like a hug’ Margot Robbie, Greta Gerwig say

July 17, 2023 admin

For Greta Gerwig, making “Barbie” was a divine calling.

The Oscar-nominated director brings tenderness and care to Mattel’s candy-coated summer time comedy (in theaters Friday), elevating it far past what audiences may count on from a movie a few plastic doll. Take, as an example, a scene the place Barbie (Margot Robbie) meets Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), the toy’s inventor.

“There’s this shot the place Ruth fingers Barbie a cup of tea, and the best way we lined it up is the precise means that God is touching Adam on the Sistine Chapel,” Gerwig says. Rodrigo Prieto, the film’s cinematographer, “was like: ‘Throw it in! Barbie deserves it. Michelangelo, let’s go!’ ”

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Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ film appears at a ‘sophisticated icon from all angles’

The movie begins with Barbie residing in perpetual bliss in Barbie Land, the place she and her fellow Barbies have all the ability and throw dance events and sleepovers each evening. However sooner or later, Barbie wakes up feeling off: She has cellulite, flat toes and nagging ideas of dying. So she journeys to Los Angeles to search out the lady who owns her – solely to be taught that Barbie dolls have been shunned by a brand new era of youngsters.

Robbie, 33, produced the long-gestating challenge and sought out Gerwig and her companion, Noah Baumbach, to put in writing the script. As a fan of Gerwig’s films “Woman Hen” (2017) and “Little Ladies” (2019), she knew the filmmaker may convey one thing “dimensional and sudden” to the story.

“ ‘Woman Hen’ looks like somebody telling you, ‘We’re going to get by this expertise collectively,’ ” says Robbie, chatting with USA TODAY previous to the Screen Actors Guild strike. “Identical with ‘Little Ladies’ – it looks like a hug. It appears becoming and virtually inevitable that the Barbie film would really feel that means. We will take a look at one thing that’s sophisticated and spiky, and never be mean-spirited and cynical. This film is brimming with optimism, and possibly individuals weren’t anticipating that from a Barbie film.”

The movie doesn’t draw back from the ridicule Barbie has obtained ever since she was launched in 1959. Some critics say that the doll promotes consumerism and unrealistic physique beliefs and that she lives a vapid existence together with her hunky arm sweet, Ken (Ryan Gosling). However the film astutely means that maybe we’ve been holding Barbie to the identical double requirements that ladies throughout the globe have confronted for hundreds of years.

“One factor we actually wished to do was take a look at this sophisticated icon from all angles, however all the time strategy all the pieces with a giant coronary heart,” Gerwig says. “For each character, we wished to provide them a hug.”

Ryan Gosling’s daughters helped him discover the ’emotional core’ of Ken

Gerwig, 39, says she has “by no means identified Barbie with out realizing the argument towards Barbie.” Rising up, “my mother was a type of mothers who wasn’t so certain about Barbie, so my first expertise with Barbie was that she was a bit forbidden. I received quite a lot of hand-me-downs from women within the neighborhood who have been already lacking footwear and had loopy hair.”

Speaking to the movie’s forged and crew, she discovered that “everybody has an opinion about Barbie,” no matter whether or not they grew up with them. Robbie would sometimes play together with her cousin’s dolls, though she most popular constructing forts and making mud pies. Gosling’s daughters, in the meantime, helped him unlock “the emotional core” of Ken, who feels insecure and forgotten by Barbie.

“Once we first talked, he stated his daughters have Barbies and so they did have a Ken someplace, however he couldn’t discover it,” Gerwig recollects. “After which he referred to as me and stated: ‘I discovered it. He’s underneath a rotting lemon exterior, and I believe that man’s story must be advised.’ I used to be like, ‘You’re precisely proper!’ ”

Margot Robbie says the movie sparked ‘massive, profound conversations’

Because the film’s most up-to-date trailer in Could, a lot of the thrill on social media has been round Gerwig’s ingenious eye for element, whether or not it’s Barbie’s extravagant all-pink Dreamhouse or how she gracefully floats into her automotive (mimicking how a toddler may transfer their doll).

“Greta actually stated, ‘I would like everybody to really feel like they will attain into the display screen and decide all the pieces up: each set, each prop, each costume,’” Robbie says.

Though she all the time figured the film could be humorous, what shocked the actress most was simply how “transferring” it finally is. After arriving in the actual world, Barbie slowly begins to find the breadth of human expertise, from the catharsis of an excellent cry to the conclusion that change is inevitable.

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