00:00 I have a real passion for Weird Barbie and the Weird Barbie house.
00:05 I love that.
00:07 As Barbie continues to take the box office by storm, moviegoers are wearing their favorite
00:12 shades of pink and immersing themselves in the toy world.
00:15 To learn more, we spoke with production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer,
00:19 the Oscar-nominated team behind movies such as Darkest Hour, Anna Karenina, Pride and
00:24 Prejudice and Beauty and the Beast.
00:26 They opened up about the creation of Barbie Land, including the Dream House, from which
00:30 Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and the cast filmed the Greta Gerwig directed hit.
00:34 Can I come to your house tonight?
00:35 Sure.
00:36 I don't have anything big planned, just a giant blowout party with all the Barbies and
00:40 planned choreography and a bespoke song.
00:41 You should stop by.
00:42 So cool.
00:43 One of the first things we did was go out and buy a Dream House and a couple of Barbies.
00:48 Yeah.
00:49 And that's...
00:50 I started playing.
00:51 I started playing.
00:52 I didn't know it was a Dream House from any particular era, but it was an interpretation
00:56 of a Dream House that hopefully encapsulated the whole feel of them.
01:01 So that when people do say, "Oh, that's my Dream House."
01:04 It feels like the Dream House.
01:05 It feels like it is, but it's nobody's Dream House.
01:07 Well, it's Barbie's Dream House.
01:08 Well, it's Barbie's Dream House.
01:09 And Ken.
01:10 And also, it's Barbie Land.
01:12 It's a world that doesn't exist.
01:14 So you had to create the world and what the world was.
01:18 And you had to create the world in a world that has no elements, has no air, has no water,
01:25 no electricity.
01:26 And you're kind of going, "Well, what does it have?"
01:29 So you're trying to work it out.
01:31 What makes it toy and what makes them dolls?
01:34 So what you might see is something quite simple, but to arrive at that simplicity, I found
01:41 very, very philosophically and intellectually challenging.
01:44 Yeah.
01:45 Actually, it was really hard.
01:46 Hi, Barbie.
01:47 Hi, Ken.
01:48 The reason why we built everything is because it's...
01:52 And built everything as opposed to doing a lot of CGI when we built miniatures as well,
01:58 which gave us our outer world.
01:59 It was because Greta very much wanted the tangibility of it.
02:05 What children, when they play, they touch.
02:09 And it's like everything...
02:11 You can feel it.
02:12 You can feel that it's in camera and it wants to feel like a giant toy.
02:16 And also, it helps the actors immensely, I think, as well, and everybody else.
02:21 Hi, I'm Weird Barbie.
02:22 I am in the splits.
02:23 I have a funky haircut and I smell like basement.
02:25 Oh my God, I had a Weird Barbie.
02:28 I have a real passion for Weird Barbie and the Weird Barbie house.
02:34 I love that.
02:35 And if I were to take something home from Weird Barbie's house, then I would be taking
02:39 home her cat.
02:40 One of the specific references for Weird Barbie was a literary reference.
02:45 So, you know when they describe in Killer Mockingbird, the Boo Radley house, and don't
02:51 go near the Boo Radley house.
02:52 And you get the feeling that if the Barbies were walking past Weird Barbie, they'd be
02:55 going, "Don't look over there.
02:56 Don't look, don't look."
02:59 And then one of the other things was the psycho house that's on the top of the hill, it's
03:05 looking up and it's got that shaped roof and everything.
03:08 And then that led on to...
03:10 Are you going to take the whole house?
03:11 I'm going to take the whole house.
03:13 And then it led on to Weird Barbie's ambulance, which to my mind was like the creepy coop
03:19 out of the Wacky Races.
03:21 And I think that when they designed the creepy coop out of the Wacky Races, they looked at
03:25 the weird, they looked at psycho.
03:26 So you kind of got this full circle.
03:28 So I would take home Weird Barbie's ambulance.
03:31 Well, I tell you what was difficult was the swimming pools, right?
03:41 So the swimming pools, and it's like, you know, like David Hockney's swimming pools
03:45 and all the lovely pools you have in LA that we never have in London because we're all
03:49 indoors.
03:50 So it's this beautiful painted, scenically painted, and then we poured on this resin,
03:55 this kind of clear resin that would give us our undulated surface.
03:59 And the first time we did it, it looked great.
04:02 We poured on the resin and the resin, when it reacts with itself, got so hot, it kind
04:07 of bleached and burned all the scenic art underneath.
04:11 So we had to chip it all out and start again.
04:13 That was a pain.
04:14 Humans only have one ending.
04:15 Get that Barbie!
04:16 Ideas live forever.
04:16 [Music]
04:21 forever.
04:22 [MUSIC PLAYING]
Comments