Greta Gerwig was on TCM picking films tonight and talked about inspiration/influences for Barbie.
She explained how “authentic artificiality” was the catchphrase for filming Barbie and named The Red Shoes as one of the films that captured that so well.
And after the film showing, she expanded on that catchphrase and how it influenced Barbie:
“I wanted it to feel like…and we always asked ourselves…how would they do this in 1959? If we were making it in 1959, would you use front projection, rear projection, how would we composite this shot, what would be the thing that we’d use then. Because to me I wanted to give myself the constraints of what a movie world is. Whatever Barbieland was was a sound stage, that it had a lid, it had an edge. And we looked at different versions of the design too, where we would see a corner joined at the end of the stage. Because I wanted that sense of being contained in a box. There’s so many examples in The Red Shoes where you both feel the edge of what the painting is but then you can also see the illusion and depth that it creates. And it was that type of juxtaposition I was interested in.”
She also named two easter eggs in Barbie for any Red Shoes fans out there:
Ken’s cateye sunglasses are inspired by the glasses on Lermontov in the train scene.
The scene Barbie walks up to Kate McKinnon’s house is shot to mimic the scene where Vicki walks up to Lermontov’s mansion in that great big dress.
She kept mentioning the “handmade” aspect of the visual in The Red Shoes. So this comment really resonated for me:
“There’s something exuberant about Powell and Pressburger’s joy of making. It feels like, ‘Well, why don’t we try it like this? Let’s make it like this.’ It feels like it gets at the heart of what I was hoping for Barbie, which…at its heart—it’s play. It has that play of cinema that I love.”
It’s a fitting statement for a movie about a child’s toy and extends to the wider realms of creative pursuits, where real life pressures often constrain child-like play and we lose the joy of making we once had.
Don’t forget the play aspect of creativity. At heart, we’re all still kids with our paint sets and dolls having fun making things and telling stories.
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Biographical movies and dramas about writers:
Tolkien (2019) - about JRR Tolkien
The Edge of Love (2008) - about Dylan Thomas
Set Fire to the Stars (2014) - about Dylan Thomas
Colette (2018) - about Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Wilde (1997) - about Oscar Wilde
The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) - about Oscar Wilde
My Salinger Year (2020) - about JD Salinger
Rebel in the Rye (2017) - about JD Salinger
Mary Shelley (2017) - about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Gothic (1986) - about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Shakespeare in Love (1998) - about William Shakespeare
Sylvia (2003) - about Sylvia Plath
Dickinson (2019-2021) - about Emily Dickinson
A Quiet Passion (2016) - about Emily Dickinson
Vita & Virginia (2019) - about Virginia Woolf
Becoming Jane (2008) - about Jane Austen
Miss Austen Regrets (2007) - about Jane Austen
Kafka (1991) - about Franz Kafka
Byron (2003) - about Lord Byron
Total Eclipse (1995) - about Paul Verlaine
Capote (2005) - about Truman Capote
Rowing with the Wind (1988) - about the Romantic Poets
Infamous (2006) - about Truman Capote
Quills (2000) - about Marquis de Sade
Neruda (2016) - about Pablo Neruda
Juana Inés (2016) - about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Daphne (2007) - about Daphne du Maurier
Priest of Love (1981) - about DH Lawrence
Little Ashes (2008) - about Federico Garcia Lorca
Lope (2010) - about Lope de Vega
Howl (2010) - about Allen Ginsberg
The Last Station (2009) - about Leo Tolstoy
Young Goethe in Love (2010) - about Johann Goethe
Tom & Viv (1994) - about T.S. Eliot
Céleste (1980) - about Marcel Proust
Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012) - about Ernest Hemingway
Balzac: A Life of Passion (1999) - about Honore de Balzac
The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) - about Charles Dickens
Shirley (2020) - about Shirley Jackson
Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017) - about Alan Alexander Milne
Heart Beat (1980) - about Jack Kerouac
In the Heart of the Sea (2015) - about Herman Melville
Notes: Not all of the films on this non-exhaustive list are entirely “about” the lives of their respective writers to a tee. I cannot vouch for the accuracy or quality of all of these movies. I’ve only seen about 75% of these films personally. And yes, I know this list is very Westernized – I’m working on it.
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