Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie and the alchemy of ‘Barbie’
How do you make a story about a ubiquitous plastic doll worth telling? What if she suffered an existential crisis? How do you raise the stakes for the making of the movie? What if its producer and star suffered a crisis as well?
“I have a distinct memory of Margot coming over to my house before we started shooting and having a bit of an actor crisis: ‘How am I doing this?’ It’s the actor equivalent of facing a blank page,” “Barbie” director and co-writer Greta Gerwig says of a hinge moment in the project with Margot Robbie.
Gerwig understood the problem. It was difficult to get traction, trying to embody a character who begins in a state of blissful perfection. When the story opens, Barbie lives an entirely frictionless life in the pink perfection of Barbie Land.
“This sounds so insane, but every day I kept thinking about — Oh, God, I’m going to sound really annoying right now, but here we go: Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ — stay with me,” Gerwig insists, “it’s about Eden. The first part of the poem is Eden before The Fall, which is
