Greta Gerwig’s Lessons From Barbie Land

This article contains spoilers for the film Barbie.

As soon as I asked a question about Ken, my call with Greta Gerwig dropped. When the writer-director of Barbie returned, she had no idea what happened. I suggested that of course merely mentioning Ken—the pining and overlooked doll played by Ryan Gosling—would cause a failure of some sort. Gerwig agreed. “The world was like, I don’t care,” she joked.

But the world cares very much about the movie he’s in. Since hitting theaters Friday, Barbie has outperformed expectations, becoming the first studio comedy to gross more than $100 million in its first weekend, as well as scoring the highest opening in North America ever for a female director. Audiences—many of whom dressed up in head-to-toe pink—packed theaters, even reportedly causing one to run out of concessions by Saturday evening.

Barbie’s massive debut makes the film Gerwig’s biggest box-office success as a director to date. Yet the movie fits cleanly into Gerwig’s oeuvre: Like 2017’s Lady Bird and 2019’s Little Women, it intimately considers how femininity is expressed. Barbie, which Gerwig wrote with her partner, Noah Baumbach, can be unexpectedly weighty. Underneath the sparkly costumes and blowout parties is a lovely, humanist story that studies how products both influence and reflect who we are.

Maybe that sounds lofty, but consider Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken’s adventure in the real world, which in the film is more than just an opportunity for fish-out-of-water hijinks. The pair take on the difficult task of navigating a society that treats men and women differently: Barbie wrestles with her flawed purpose as a toy meant to represent the ideal woman; Ken, created solely to be Barbie’s arm candy, gets his first taste of power by observing humans, and misunderstands what he sees. Barbie is playful and thoughtful at once, a joke-fueled, often surreal spectacle wrapped around an earnest, feminist, and thoroughly Gerwig-ian core.

When we spoke on Friday morning, though, Gerwig had no idea how Barbie would land. She anticipated being, as she put it, “anxious all day,” and was eager to chat instead of worrying about the movie’s reception. We spoke about the thematic through line of her films, as well as what her time in Barbie Land taught her. (And don’t worry, Ken fans. We got to him eventually.)

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Shirley Li: There are big ideas in this Barbie movie about self-worth and how what we consume—or play with, in the case of dolls—affects who we become. I noticed a little girl at my screening asking lots of questions during the film; she seemed a bit confused by the headier themes but was having a good time, especially when the dolls sang and danced. So I’m curious: When you and Noah were writing the film, who did you picture as your viewer?

Greta Gerwig: I don’t really have a strong sense of, Here’s stuff for kids; here’s stuff for adults. I know there’s stuff that is more heady, but when I look back at my viewing experiences as a kid, it was often the things that were just beyond me that were the most compelling, because they felt like a little window into a world that I was emerging into.

Li: Like what?

Gerwig: This is a very strange, very specific memory, but when I was 5, my dad was working in New York, and my mom and I got rush tickets to Gypsy. I didn’t understand most of it, but when Gypsy is performing in a burlesque club, there are these strippers wearing old-timey stripper outfits with sparkles, and I loved it. I didn’t understand half of what had gone on, but we got one of those big commemorative books, and I remember just studying the pages where all the strippers were, because I thought they were so beautiful. I didn’t have any sense of them being objectified. I just loved that they wore these beautiful, glittery outfits and big headdresses. There’s probably a ton of memories I have like that.

Li: Lady Bird is based on your own experiences, Little Women is a book you loved growing up, and you played with Barbies when you were young. Has using your films to revisit the touchstones of childhood been an intentional choice for you?

Gerwig: Honestly, it’s something that’s been somewhat hidden from me in the making of them, because on the surface they look so different. But now that I’m through this one, I can see that they’re all circling this idea. [Laughs.] You’re interested in what you’re interested in, and I’m interested in women. But I also think—and this sounds kind of silly—one of my obsessions, as it were, is that I truly kind of can’t believe that we live in linear time. [Laughs.] It’s a shocker. Obviously, when you have a kid, you’re extremely connected to that, but you can be connected to it within your life as well.

And I think that in trying to pull it together and understand where you are and where you’ve been, there’s always an ache in it. Clearly that was the way in which I approached adapting Little Women, because I saw the characters as adults, suddenly, in a way that I had never seen them when I was young. And with Lady Bird, it’s a story with a high-school student, and there are certain things that you feel it’s important to hit, like the prom, but actually it’s about your mother, and your leaving. It’s something I return to because cinema is inherently a time capsule anyway, so it already deals in time. It’s what I’m intellectually and artistically interested in, and the medium itself seems to have that already embedded in it.

Read: Greta Gerwig’s Little Women finally gives Amy her due

Li: Maybe the better way to put it is: Your films are kind of all about how girls learn to be women.

Gerwig: Oh, yeah!

Li: Have I oversimplified?

Gerwig: No, I love it! That’s beautiful. [Laughs.] Maybe that’s the thing you do forever, though. I don’t know that that’s, like, a place you arrive to. It’s certainly not related to an age, because it’s forever unfolding.

Li: In that case, what preoccupies you about girlhood that making these movies is perhaps helping you understand?

Gerwig: Well, taking it apart is difficult, but so much of it for me has to do with intergenerational conversations. When I think of my grandmother to my mother to me, life for women has just transformed so, so much, and I don’t know where it’s transforming next, but we keep learning from each other. I’m going to be 40 in a week, and I’m starting to feel, in a wonderful way, like I belong to the generation that young women will look back on, and that feels wonderful and strange. I do think it’s a way for me to be in the conversation in a deep way that feels worth having, whether it’s womanhood or personhood or existing in linear time. [Laughs.] Linear time is a real hang-up I have.

Li: You’ve said that making this film felt as personal as anything else you’ve made. Is there a scene that comes to mind that you feel really evokes how personal this film is for you?

Gerwig: It’s everything from the font for the Barbie logo—I kept being drawn to the bubble-letter version because in part that was the one I saw at Toys “R” Us—down to the fact that Kate McKinnon’s character was very much a reflection of the Barbies that I had, a doll that’s been loved and is no longer in a state of pristine perfection in the box. And the woman Barbie sees on the bench is a friend of mine, the brilliant costume designer Ann Roth. I just kept thinking of faces, and when you look at her face, I think you see something that feels like a life lived, and that age is not just valuable in its duration.

And [when Barbie and her creator hold hands], all those video clips were taken from everyone who worked on the movie—women, mothers, sisters, daughters, friends. I’m a big believer in, like, even if you don’t literally know things in a movie, I think you can kind of feel them. I’ve always loved the fact that in Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese’s mother plays the mom. You don’t know that that’s his mom, but you feel that she’s exactly that person somehow, and it feels personal. In a way, it’s not dissimilar to being a child watching a movie and not understanding every reference, but somehow feeling it. The personal embedded in it is part of what people unconsciously glean.

Li: Speaking of those video clips, let’s talk more about the ending. Can you tell me about the decision to have the Barbies and Kens reach, not a definitive solution, but kind of a détente? President Barbie, played by Issa Rae, does not allow Ken a seat on the Supreme Court. They’re still figuring things out.

Gerwig: We’re all still figuring things out—that’s part of it. But the only thing I could ever give anyone is that they’re all still in the mess. Maybe it’s a little better for the Kens. You don’t want to tell people how to watch things, but at the end of the movie, the production design incorporates some of Ken’s fascinations into Barbie Land. Like, the perfection is not as beautiful as the thing that started blending everything together. I remember when we went to shoot the finale, when we all walked on set, we were like, This is the most beautiful it’s ever been.

Li: Can you walk me through why Ken rejects the patriarchy in the end? It’s interesting that he admits he didn’t understand it.

Gerwig: [Silence]

Li: Oh, no. Greta, did I lose you? Hello?

Gerwig: Hi, okay, I don’t know what happened. It just went away.

Li: It’s okay. I think it’s kind of funny that a question about Ken led to you dropping off the call.

Gerwig: [Laughs.] The world was like, “I don’t care.”

Li: Yeah, “Let’s move on.” So I was asking: Where did the idea that Ken doesn’t actually want to take over Barbie Land come from? The film is careful to paint him not as a vindictive antagonist, but as a misguided one.

Gerwig: Well, in a way, you do things unconsciously and then sort of piece it together later, but there was an element where it felt like at the end, you want to be rescued from yourself. I guess the dark dystopian version of it is Lord of the Flies, like, children gone wild. They’re dolls, but they’re also sort of psychologically children.

I think about my stepson, actually. When he was younger, he just didn’t go to bed. So one time, I walked into his bedroom, and he was standing on his bed throwing his stuffed animals around, and he screamed, “I wish someone would make me stop!” It was so pure [laughs], like, actually, he is right! He wished someone would make him stop. And when Ryan Gosling and I talked about how he would perform the ending, I talked a lot about my 4-year-old son. If he’s crying, and you say, “Harold, are you upset we had to leave the park?” He’ll say, “Ye-ea-aah, ye-ee-aah.” Like, he’s acknowledging [his sadness], but even just doing that is so hard, that quality of emotion.

Obviously, these systems are terrible for men too. When America was giving her beautiful speech, I was just sobbing, and then I looked around, and I realized everybody’s crying on the set. The men are crying too, because they have their own speech they feel they can’t ever give, you know? And they have their twin tightrope, which is also painful. There’s something about some of these structures that is just, you know, “Somebody make me stop!” That’s sort of, I suppose, the feeling behind Ken.

Read: The surprising key to understanding the Barbie film

Li: This is such a massive movie, and it’s a high-pressure moment in your career. You hold a lot of power as a filmmaker now, and I have to ask, what do you intend to do with it?

Gerwig: [Laughs.] What do I intend? Being a filmmaker is an amazing thing, because movies are hard, and you’ll never really get on top of the mountain. Because whatever you’re making next, you haven’t made—so then you’re going to learn what you don’t know about this movie, you know? It’s difficult, and that’s part of the appeal. But then, also, you’re only going to make a movie, if you’re lucky, once every two, three, four years. So if you start doing the math of a life, you realize, What am I going to do, make 15 movies? You know, not too many. But if I’m lucky, I can get to a life that will feel as meaningful as anything I could hope to do. I do want to make movies in my 60s and my 70s, and God willing, maybe I’ll make some extremely strange ones in my 80s.

Li: Now that you’ve done the big-budget studio tentpole, how do you envision your storytelling evolving? I imagine that you haven’t always been doing the math of a life.

Gerwig: I want to be able to make movies at all scales. I like having the skill set to make something tiny, and I like having the skills to paint with the biggest brushes. It’s always about what’s going to give you the most freedom creatively, and that can mean different things.

I feel extraordinarily lucky also to have been able to grow into something bigger. I co-wrote, I co-directed, I acted in a lot of things in my 20s, and I kind of used that to get to take on directing. Little Women was an intermediate step, and when I think about young filmmakers, depending on what you want to do, those mid-level movies are just incredible to make if you’re interested in seeing how it can expand or contract. I feel very grateful that I got to do that, because I couldn’t have done this without that.