Production Designer Sarah Greenwood and Set Decorator Katie Spencer have been through it all in their storied, beautifully drawn careers as creative collaborators. They’ve even gone to the top of an active volcano in Italy. That’s where they got the call from director Greta Gerwig that she needed their talents on BARBIE, a satirical, uproariously funny and very pink comedy about the titular icon whose perfect life experiences quite a few disruptive imperfections.
I sat down with the talented team to discuss every burning question about translating child’s play into a grow-up world of wonder and imagination.
You both have worked on quite a few period pieces – many of which with Joe Wright. What about those films perhaps prepared you for Barbie Land?
Katie Spencer: “It’s an interesting story that we were actually working with Joe when, Sarah, you got the call from Greta. We were doing CYRANO in Sicily on Mt. Etna, which is the most active volcano in Europe and she was erupting. That was quite a combination – and two meters of snow, doing a battle sequence. What’s amazing about what we do is the variety. You learn all the time. What did we necessarily know about BEAUTY AND THE BEAST or anything like that?!
It’s about creating a world, whether it’s set now or a hundred years ago, or whether you’re doing the story of Barbie. But the difference with Barbie is she doesn’t have a narrative of her own. She’s not Anna Karenina. She doesn’t have a story behind her, but you do have this amazing script by Greta.”
Sarah Greenwood: “And she’s so iconic as well. You have a lot of knowledge. You come with your own prejudices. We didn’t have Barbies when we were little, partly because we’re English and they weren’t as prevalent in our childhoods. Barbie wasn’t as recognized. It was interesting thing to read that script and read Greta’s love of Barbie, because she played with them until she was quite old apparently – on a bigger scale. To read her interpretation and to hear the backstory of Ruth Handler and why she made the doll and what it became – the feminist icon the doll became – was incredible. It was a real eye-opener to go deep into Barbie.”
Spencer: “Yeah, it was a revelation, certainly for me.”
Greenwood: “And actually to own our first Barbie. When we were starting the project, we bought a Dreamhouse and bought a couple of Barbies and a couple of Kens and played with them. That was a revelation within itself, because you start to understand scale and what’s in the house and what’s not in the house. A lot of Greta’s wonderful descriptions of how the Barbie moves is how the process was going to be. One of our first questions was, ‘Are they jointed? How are we going to do this?’ She said, ‘You have a Barbie and she doesn’t walk up the stairs,’ so we didn’t have stairs, and she goes to the top of the house and jumps off into her car. Ken when he’s running into the sea and bang and spins – that’s what kids do. It explained a lot about the approach we were going to take on the film was to be very, very toy-like, but there’s a reality to it as well. Greta described it as an authentic artificiality. Learning about it through [Greta’s eyes].”
Spencer: “She has this huge knowledge of all films. She’s a Barbie of the ‘80s, which is why settled on that ‘80s logo. She was absolutely sure she was going to have that big block party disco number in it. But she loves the old Technicolor movies – the old musicals, like Vincent Minelli’s films and Powell and Pressburger’s and SINGING IN THE RAIN. Wherever you are and you’re talking to a director about these films, who wouldn’t want to go on that journey with them?!”
It seems like you were focused on a singular vision, which wasn’t tied to era-specific Dreamhouses since this has an overall cohesive look versus a jumbled mix-and-match of different architectures and colors. Did you go back into Mattel’s archives and paw through those to see what?
Greenwood: “We looked at the history of the Dreamhouses. A lot of appeal was in the very first one – the cardboard one that opens out and everything. It was mostly done to keep Barbie Margot in one period of time.”
Spencer: “We certainly looked at the journey of Barbie and who she became, when it was successful and when it was not successful, which houses worked. We have an aesthetic we liked, but the most important thing that Greta was saying was it was what a young girl would love, as opposed to what we would love. Therefore it’s embracing the child who opened the box and what you have in there is your perfect imagining of a Dreamhouse. In fact, the Dreamhouse we created feels like it’s a replication of a Dreamhouse, but it’s not a replication. It’s an idea of a Dreamhouse that’s cherry picked from all over the place – of real world architecture, the world of Palm Springs, the world of Slim Aarons.
It’s not specifically taken from a Mattel Dreamhouse. It’s a simplification. Like you said, there’s so much going on, if you start to mix the periods, you’re lost. There’s so much going on in the film that you actually want to have a real clarity. I know people will laugh when I say it, but that set is really clear compared to which way it could’ve gone. We do it for the script and the story and, of course, it’s Barbie Margot’s Perfect Day. It’s also to capture the beauty of Americana as well. It’s a celebration of that.
Greenwood: “Very simply put, where you are, what’s happening, what’s the moment, it all comes from the script. The fact there’s no water, there’s no electricity, there’s no wind, no rain, no atmosphere, no elements. Again, for us, you know our work, it’s very layered and very patina’d and very textured. For us, to use pure color with nowhere to hide, very brightly lit, it was like, ‘Oh my god.’ It was, weirdly, taking stuff away. I know there’s loads there.”
Spencer: “They said Margot was going to do a tour of the Dreamhouse and we shot that while we were still filming and we thought, ‘Well that’s gonna take about two seconds.’ But it’s not! It’s a lot more detailed than you think.”
God is truly in the details here. There’s so much that’s unseen too, like the child-like penmanship on the letters. Do you have favorite small, or innocuous detail in this movie?
Spencer: “[Sarah] was very strong on the use of decals to begin with and we had a great graphics team. I have to say it was a lot of fun to working out the letters and books – the humor – of translating it from the real world to Barbie Land. We hooted when we were thinking of things.”
Greenwood: “The Supreme Court with the Citizen Ken horses in the horseshoes. It was like CITIZEN KANE. There’s so much in it that we do to amuse ourselves most of the time. The Barbie Land sign on the mountains is like the Hollywoodland sign – same graphics, same font.”
Spencer: “Lots of references to THE WIZARD OF OZ. The open road that goes to the desert is made of bricks – the pink brick road and you see it on in the cinema and in the rainbow, the skywriting is like the Wicked Witch. There’s a lot of fun in there. There’s references for grownups and people who know the films and then it’s there for the kids to enjoy.”
Choosing which pinks to use must’ve been labor some. Was it a team effort to collaborate with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto and costume designer Jacqueline Durran to figure out which were gonna work with the actors’ dynamic range in skin tones and wardrobe?
Spencer: “Yeah. It’s all we ever thought about. The palette that we worked from was over a hundred pinks, from the salmon pinks to the purple pinks. We settled on this sweet spot – the perfect pinks. And then doing the camera tests with Jacqueline’s costumes and her palette was bigger than ours. And how the pinks work against each other, like you put that beautiful pink against a yellow and suddenly the yellow goes gray.
You’re absolutely right; Poor Rodrigo loved and hated us in the same breath. But he’s a genius! The houses were pink. They had to be pink. Off camera, he built these gray boxes to get rid of any reflections. So as soon as you’re off camera, it’s just gray so there’s no bouncing pink. Because, my god, it didn’t help.”
Greenwood: “Kate, in the early days when we were working it out, you did go pink blind, so you had to walk away and cleanse your palette.”
How much of a challenge was it to build Barbie Land practically and did The Real World sets present less hassle?
Greenwood: “The Real World sets were a delight actually. Ruth Handler’s kitchen and America Ferrera’s house, these were all sets, so it was like coming home. A bit of layering and patina and all that.”
Spencer: “In America’s house, there are little references there. There’s little Easter Eggs everywhere.”
Greenwood: “Once we knew our rules and parameters, had our palette and knew how the dolls were gonna be. And then it became more and more fun. Everybody understood why we were doing what we were doing. I think it really helped the actors, particularly the ones coming in for their parts. They understood what the world was.”
What was the most difficult idea or concept to bring to fruition, from sketch to the final product?
Greenwood: “Honestly, if I say the whole film was one of the most intellectually and challenging films we’ve ever done, that might sound crazy, but that was the truth of it. So it’s not one thing in particular. It’s conceiving of what Barbie Land is…”
Spencer: “…all the way through to Barbie.”
Greenwood: “And the transitions when they go back. It’s written as, ‘You’re going through the Space Time Continuum,’ so you think you’re going to do some Marvel thing. No, you’re not. You’re going to get on a very slow boat. And all of that was in camera, painted and mechanical. it’s the slowest way possible of traveling from one world to another. You don’t explain any of it, but it’s just a thing of beauty isn’t it? It was lovely to see and do. A lot of fun. I’m just so glad, having seen it, it hangs together. It works – all these mad ideas Greta had.”
Spencer: “That’s the thing. Everybody came on board. She’s a great leader. And let’s not forget Margot. She’s not a vanity producer. She’s a proper producer. Together, they accompanied the Barbie Land spirit.”
BARBIE opens in theaters on July 21.
