While all eyes are onBarbiestars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, as well as praise for director Greta Gerwig’s feminist message, the world ofBarbiewould not have been possible if not for production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer. In an interview withVariety, Greenwood and Spencer share their behind-the-scenes design process for building the amazing world of Barbie Land.
When the project started, Greenwood explained that producers Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley, Gerwig, and Mattel gave her and Spencer complete creative freedom to craft Barbie Land.“That was great and scary because it was like, ‘Oh, right, now we’ve got to go and figure it out.” Most of the sets were built on sound stages, which enabled Greta Gerwig and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto to convey an immersive feeling of actually being in Barbie Land. In its entirety, Barbie Land featured 12 primary shades of pink in addition to over 100 other pink shades and had zero black colors.
Forstereotypical Barbie’s Dreamhouse, inhabited by Margot Robbie, the two designers studied past iterations of the house. While researching vintage homes, they noticed that most of the toy houses were smaller than the actual doll. Because of this discovery, they reduced the size of the house by 23 percent, so Margot could appear bigger than the furniture. “When Margot is in the house, she could touch the roof and she’s too big for the car, and we set certain rules around that.” In total, the physical dimensions of the house on set measured “50 feet high and 800 feet long.”
One of the biggest challenges the designers faced was that many of the houses had very few walls. The open architecture further added a feeling of connectedness between the Barbies. “Everything you saw, you saw into another house. You had to be aware of the action that was taking place there and beyond. So, we had to consider the color and every small thing because nothing was hidden,” said Spencer. “The cars didn’t have engines, and not all the houses had stairs, so we were taking away so much stuff that you normally hide behind.”
Related:Barbie: 10 Behind-the-Scenes Moments That Fans Will Love
The Making of Weird Barbie’s Nightmare House
The duo took a more abstract and avant-garde approach to Weird Barbie’s (Katie McKinnon) house. In the film, Weird Barbie is treated as an outcast and lives separately from the perfect Barbies on a hill withthe discontinued Barbies. She represents the Barbie doll that was “played with too much” and now knows the human world. To convey Weird Barbie’s personality, the designers took inspiration from the stairs leading up to the antagonist’s house in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic horror filmPsycho(1960).
“One of my early references is that you go up the stairs, and there’s the ‘Psycho’ house, and we brought in other elements.” Its design was deliberately skewed with everything pushed out of shape and out of order,” says Greenwood. Weird Barbie was one of the last houses built on set just before shooting. Apart from the eye-catching stairs, a cat and pool were built but unfortunately weren’t prominent in the film. “We added Weird Barbie’s cat. Like everything else, it’s camouflaged. But her cat is 4 feet 6.” explained Spencer.
Check out Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer’s fantastic design work in Greta Gerwig’sBarbie,now in theaters.
