Greta Gerwig’s 'Barbie' Has a Lot of Unlikely Influences (original) (raw)

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Published Sep 2, 2023, 4:00 PM EDT

Currently a features writer at Collider, Elisa Guimarães is an arts and entertainment journalist and a critic with over a decade of experience. Passionate about movies and TV shows as a whole, she started her career when she was still in college, writing for a local newspaper after a brief stint in film school. However, her love for all things media-related can be dated back to her childhood, as she was raised in a family of librarians and cinephiles. She adores coming of age stories, true crime, teen dramas, science fiction, horror, and some other things as well. Elisa is also a published author of short stories in Portuguese, as well as a translator and a master in linguistics. As of 2023, she's in the process of working towards her PhD.

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Summary

• Greta Gerwig's Barbie watchlist is full of surprising and unexpected movie choices, showcasing her eclectic tastes and influences.
• The aesthetics of Barbie were inspired by directors like Jacques Demy, Pedro Almodóvar, and Vincente Minelli, who used bright colors and unique settings in their films.
• The story and plot of Barbie draw inspiration from movies like The Truman Show, The Wizard of Oz, and The Philadelphia Story, highlighting themes of self-discovery and the human experience.

Greta Gerwig's Barbie starring Margot Robbie and **Ryan Gosling**has dominated movie theaters and exceeded many people's wildest expectations at the box-office. Those who have been following Gerwig's career for a long time probably took it upon themselves to rewatch the director's movies, from her mumblecore days to her sensitive depictions of female youth in both Lady Bird and Little Women, to Frances Ha, a film in which she stars as an actress under the direction of her husband, Noah Baumbach, who is also one of Barbie's screenwriters. But, alas, no Barbie fan could've prepared themselves for Greta Gerwig's inspirations for Barbie. In an interview with Letterboxd, she spoke about the movies that she believes are a perfect fit for a _Barbie_-themed watch party, and, boy, did her list pack some surprises!

'Barbie' Gets Its Look From 'The Wizard of Oz' and Jacques Demy

A close-up shot of Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Image via 20th Century Studios

Granted, Gerwig's watchlist (which can be perused on Letterboxd) isn't exactly meant to get viewers hyped up for her film. The films chosen by the director, however, speak volumes about how she crafted the look and the plot of her movie. It's a list of art that Gerwig admires and returned to in the process of creating her own story. Still, some of theentries on the list are definitely unexpected, and their impact on Barbie is not straightforward. The list features movies from classic Hollywood and classic French cinema alike, as well as some more modern masterpieces. In order to create Barbie's ultra-pink world without running the risk of making something nightmarish, Gerwig sought out movies and filmmakers that make particularly good use of bright colors in their works.

The most obvious influence is French director Jacques Demy, who is known for bubblegum settings and wardrobes so colorful that they border on the surreal. For her watchlist, Gerwig picked three of Demy's movies, two of which are classic French musicals: 1964's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1967's The Young Girls of Rochefort, and 1969's Model Shop. Cherbourg also served as inspiration for Barbie's ponytail during parts of the movie, which was lifted from Catherine Deneuve's Geneviève. The use of color in Barbie was also influenced heavily by Pedro Almodóvar's overly saturated masterpiece Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, as well as by the monochromatic shots in Leslie Caron's introductory scene in Vincente Minelli's An American in Paris. The latter also had a huge impact on the whole "Hi, Barbie!" sequence, for the Barbies salute each other from their dream homes much like Lise Bouvier, Caron's character, greets the different versions of herself that pop up on the screen.

Barbie stops the Kens from having a Beach Off

Image via Warner Bros.

To achieve the farcical look of Barbie without erring on the side of the ridiculous or the visually unpleasant, Gerwig also went through pictures that made great use of soundstages and painted settings. Something that has been widely remarked on when it comes Barbie is how amazing and refreshing the handmade backgrounds of Barbieland look, especially in a world in which everything has become CGI. The idea, Gerwig remarks while discussing the inclusion of Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz on her list, was to achieve a sense of authentic artificiality. With its painted skies and a yellow brick road that was turned into pastel pink for Barbie, The Wizard of Oz is a clear influence for Gerwig, but the director also had her cast and crew watching Federico Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, and Peter Weir's The Truman Show. Weir was even kind enough to chat with Gerwig on the phone about how he shot his movie. Another big influence are Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger movies, particularly 1948's The Red Shoes and 1946's A Matter of Life and Death. What drew Gerwig to the duo was "the way that [their movie] never pretended to be anything other than on a soundstage."

Many films helped craft the overall look and vibes of Barbie. For the camerawork, Gerwig mentions Max Ophül's The Earrings of Madame de..., while the physical humor was borrowed from Charles Chaplin's Modern Times. The movie's music-centered approach was inspired by disco, hence the inclusion of John Badham's Saturday Night Fever and Frank Marshall's Bee Gees documentary, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart. The rhythm of the plot and the dialogue came from Tim Burton's Pee Wee's Big Adventure and Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday, and the idea for the practical sets was courtesy of Jacques Tati, particularly his 1958 movie **Mon Oncle**and 1967's Play Time. The offices of Mattel in the movie, more specifically, owe a lot to the cubicles of the workers in Play Time.

'Barbie's Plot Is Both High Concept and Grounded

Margot Robbie wearing a cowboy hat and smiling at an older woman at the bus stop in Barbie

Image via Warner Bros. Pictures

The influence that movies from classicHollywood to modern European cinema had on Barbie doesn't stop at the film's visuals. A lot of cinematic knowledge also went into crafting the story of the living doll that eventually becomes human. In Barbie, the titular doll travels from her fantastic land to the real world to find out why things have suddenly started going wrong for her and why she's plagued with thoughts of death. But though she begins her trip certain that she wants to remain forever in her perfect universe, witnessing the complexity of the human experience makes her choose a different life. It's a story that has a lot of rapport with The Truman Show, in which a man, played by Jim Carrey, finds out that his entire life has been nothing but an elaborate reality show. It is also somewhat of an inversion of The Wizard of Oz, in which a hurricane takes young Dorothy (Judy Garland) to a magical land: in Barbie, it's Barbie's emotional hurricane that takes her to the real world.

But not all of Barbie's references are this direct. Gerwig also mentions, for instance, George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story, a 1940 movie with a more grounded plot, in which Katharine Hepburn plays a socialite whose plans of remarrying are foiled by her ex-husband and a reporter. In her Letterboxd interview, Gerwig explains that she sees herBarbie much like Hepburn's Tracy Lord, a woman with a carefully crafted persona that falls apart throughout the movie and finds herself in the process. She also recommends Howard Hawks' 1934 20th Century, a **Pygmalion**-like story about a Broadway producer and an up-and-coming actress for how its stars, John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, play off of each other. According to Gerwig, it has a lot in common with what she had in mind for Ken and Barbie.

Some movies that appear in Greta Gerwig's watchlist are a lot more mysterious, and the director's cryptic statements about them in the interview do little to make us understand how they even got there. Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, for instance, is there because it features conversations with an angel, while Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind has in its forefront "a maniacal belief in something that seemed sort of crazy, but that was actually true, that I thought captured something about Barbie to me," in Gerwig's words. This all points, however, to the director fittingly seeing Barbie as something that is not only human, but more than human: an otherworldly being at which we look in nothing but awe. But, in order not to let this high concept become too far-fetched to viewers, Gerwig chose to take inspiration from movies with equally outlandish premises that value the human side of the story more than the fantastical. Her main references were Warren Beatty and Buck Henry's Heaven Can Wait, in which a man's soul is reaped by accident and sent back to Earth in the body of a recently murdered millionaire, and Ron Howard's Splash, in which Tom Hanks falls in love with a mermaid played by Daryl Hannah.

From 'All That Jazz' to 'The Godfather,' Barbie References a Lot of Classic Movies

Marlon Brando in The Godfather

Image via Paramount Pictures

But what about the movies that are directly referenced in Barbie, from the ones that inspired some of the film's most iconic scenes to those that are mentioned by title? Well, Greta Gerwig credits An American in Paris and Jerry Lewis'1961 Ladies Man with giving her the idea for Barbieland's introductory scene, in which we go through Barbie's morning routine. The dance-off between Kens takes inspiration from many cinematic dream ballets, from the dream-inside-a-dream in Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain, to Fred Zinnemann's Oklahoma!, to a surreal dance number in the lesser-known Gold Diggers of 1935 by Busby Berkeley. The so-called "Ken ballet" also draws a lot from Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, and, though Gerwig doesn't go into detail about it, it's tough not to see the influences Randal Kleiser's Grease had on the Kens.

When prompted by the interviewer, Gerwig also saw a lot of similarities between Barbie's "Do you guys ever think about dying?" and All That Jazz's iconic verse "I think I'm gonna die." The moment in which Barbie climbs the stairs to Weird Barbie's (Kate McKinnon) house is a direct reference to the stair-climbing scene in The Red Shoes, a movie which also lent Ken his cat-eye glasses, and, finally, Barbie's disco-themed party owes a fair deal tothe dance scenes in Saturday Night Fever. The presence of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey on Gerwig's list goes almost without mentioning: we all saw the impact the monolith scene had on the director when Barbie's first teaser came out.

But the question on everyone's minds is: does Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather make the cut? In Barbie, the classic mafia film is treated as the epitome of male filmmaking, with all the Kens obsessing over the movie and spending hours upon hours explaining every little detail of it to the Barbies in their bizarre version of patriarchy. And, indeed, when the time came to make a list of the films that influenced Barbie, Gerwig did include The Godfather. So if you are planning a _Barbie_-themed watch party, don't forget that it wasn't Ken who said you should see this movie, but Greta herself. And, to make your party complete, don't forget to add the BBC's _Pride and Prejudice_miniseries to your playlist. We're sure Ms. Gerwig recommends it as well.