Margot Robbie thought ‘Barbie’ would never be made
“What a shame it’s never going to see the light of day,” Robbie recalled thinking after finishing the script by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.
This Barbie is still in shock Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s script has been greenlit.
After a whirlwind journey to bring the live-action “Barbie” adaptation to the big screen, star and producer Margot Robbie revealed that the script co-written by director Gerwig is almost too good to be true.
“When I first read the script for ‘Barbie,’ my reaction was, ‘Ah! It is very good. What a shame it will never see the light of day,” Robbie told BAFTA, “because they’ll never let us make this movie.” But they did.”
As for the details of the mysterious “Barbie” script, Robbie coyly said, “I can’t say!”
The trailer for “Barbie,” co-starring Ryan Gosling, paid direct homage to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and featured multiple double-entendres, such as puns on a beach fight.
Robbie’s co-star Simu Liu teased that the film was “crazy” and that the script was one of the best his agent had ever read.
“He literally said that,” Liu recalled. “He said, ‘If I could stake my career on one script, it would be the script for ‘Barbie.’ I really think you should.”
Writer-director Gerwig opened up about writing the film after being approached by producer Robbie in 2020.
“I think there’s something about starting from that place where it’s like, ‘Well, anything is possible!’ It felt like I was getting dizzy,” Gerwig said in an episode of the series Dua Lipa’s At Your Service Podcast. “For example, where do you start? What would the story be?”
Gerwig continued, “I think I had a feeling it was going to be really interesting terror. That’s usually where the best stuff is. When you say, “I’m afraid of this.” Anything where you say, “This could be career-ending,” you say, “Okay, I should probably do it.”
Gerwig added that her real-life partner and “Barbie” co-writer Baumbach was also involved in the direction.
“At first I didn’t know I was going to direct,” he said. “And at a certain point while we were writing it, I realized that I really wanted to direct it because I thought it was really good. I think the moment I knew I wanted to direct was when Noah said to me, “Are you sure you want to direct this?” And I said, Oh, yes you are you interested in directing it? No, no, it’s mine.”
Baumbach cited their collaboration on “White Noise” as influencing the tone of the script for “Barbie.”
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