#quality film meta on tcm guest picks night

[zimshan]

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.