Greta Gerwig grew up with second-hand Barbies.
Greta Gerwig's mom was not a big fan of Barbie
The 39-year-old helm is at the helm of the summer blockbuster 'Barbie' - which stars Margot Robbie in the title role and features other A-Listers like Dua Lipa and Nicola Coughlan as other variations of the iconic Mattel doll - but explained that because her mother was not a big fan of the toy, she was given a lot of "hand-me-down" dolls that looked more like Kate McKinnon's character of Weird Barbie from the movie.
She told The AU Review: "Well, I grew up with a mom who didn’t love Barbie, which only made me more interested in Barbie. I got a lot of hand-me-down Barbies, so I got a lot of Barbies who looked like Kate McKinnon’s version, (where) it was like they didn’t have hair and their clothes were on backwards. So that Barbie is very close to my heart. When we signed on to write it I went to the Mattel headquarters and they opened up all the archives and took me through everything from you know, 1959 until now, and their designers and the people who work there were just really fun to talk to and really interesting. But I would say what we did was if there were rules, I think we broke all of them. That was part of the fun of it. It was like “Tell me what your sacred cows are and I will do something naughty with it.”
"But Margot, as a producer, was so instrumental in the whole process of just saying, “I want to make this.” I wanted to make her version of this movie, her vision, and really protect (that). But yeah, if anything, it was like an introduction to all the rules that could be broken."
Greta went on to add that she is "very grateful" to have had Margot, 33, on board to take on the role of Barbie and feels "blessed" to have been able to direct such a "wild bananas" movie.
She added: "I know it’s like overwhelming and amazing, and I just feel very grateful that Margot came to me almost four years ago and said, 'Would you want to write a Barbie movie?' And I am grateful that in my postpartum haze of four years ago, I said yes.
"It’s just been such an extraordinary confluence of so many people coming together who are just so outrageously smart and talented… and that we got to make this wild bananas Barbie movie feels like just an extraordinary blessing."
'Barbie' is in cinemas now.
Tagged in Barbie Greta Gerwig Margot Robbie