00:00I have a real passion for Weird Barbie and the Weird Barbie house.
00:05I love that.
00:07As Barbie continues to take the box office by storm,
00:11moviegoers are wearing their favorite shades of pink
00:13and immersing themselves in the toy world.
00:15To learn more, we spoke with production designer Sarah Greenwood
00:18and set decorator Katie Spencer,
00:20the Oscar-nominated team behind movies such as Darkest Hour,
00:23Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice, and Beauty and the Beast.
00:26They opened up about the creation of Barbie Land,
00:28including The Dream House, from which Margot Robbie,
00:31Ryan Gosling, and the cast filmed the Greta Gerwig-directed hit.
00:34Can I come to your house tonight?
00:36Sure.
00:36I don't have anything they planned,
00:38just a giant blowout party with all the Barbies
00:40and planned choreography and a bespoke song.
00:41You should stop by.
00:43So cool.
00:44One of the first things we did was go out and buy a dream house
00:46and a couple of Barbies.
00:49Yeah, and that's...
00:49It's such a playing.
00:50It's such a playing.
00:51It wasn't recreating a dream house from any particular era,
00:54but it was an interpretation of a dream house
00:57that hopefully encapsulated the whole feel of them
01:01so that when people do say,
01:02oh, that's my dream house...
01:04It feels like the dream house.
01:05It feels like it is, but it's nobody's dream house.
01:07Well, it's Barbie's dream house.
01:09Well, it's Barbie's dream house.
01:10And Ken.
01:11And also, it's Barbie Land.
01:12It's a world that doesn't exist.
01:14So you had to create the world and what the world was,
01:18and you had to create the world in a world
01:20that has no elements, has no air,
01:23has no water and no electricity.
01:27And you're kind of going, well, what does it have?
01:29You know, so you're trying to work it out,
01:31you know, and what makes it toy
01:32and what makes them dolls, you know?
01:35So what you might see is something quite simple,
01:37but to arrive at that simplicity,
01:40I found very, very philosophically
01:43and intellectually challenging.
01:44Yeah, actually, it was really hard.
01:46The reason why we built everything
01:51is because it's, and built everything
01:53as opposed to doing a lot of CGI
01:55when we built miniatures as well,
01:58which gave us our outer worlds.
02:00You know, it was because Greta very much
02:02wanted the tangibility, you know, of it.
02:05You know, that what children,
02:06when they play, they touch, you know?
02:09And it's like everything, you can feel it.
02:12You can feel that it's in camera
02:13and it wants to feel like a giant toy.
02:16And also, it helps, it helps the actors immensely,
02:19I think, as well, and everybody else, yeah.
02:21Hi, I'm Weird Barbie.
02:23I am in the splits.
02:24I have a funky haircut and I smell like basement.
02:26Oh my God, I had a Weird Barbie.
02:28I have a real passion for Weird Barbie
02:32and the Weird Barbie house.
02:34I love that.
02:35And if I were to take something home
02:37from Weird Barbie's house,
02:38then I would be taking home her cat.
02:40One of the specific references for Weird Barbie
02:43was a literary reference.
02:46So, you know, when they're describing
02:47in Kill Your Mockingbird,
02:48the Boo Radley house,
02:50you know, and don't go near the Boo Radley house.
02:52And you get the feeling that
02:53if the Barbies were walking past Weird Barbies,
02:55they'd be going,
02:55don't look over there,
02:56don't look, don't look, you know?
02:58And then, you know,
03:00one of the other things was like the psycho house,
03:02you know, that's on the top of the hill
03:04with that, you know, it's looking up
03:05and it's got that shaped roof and everything.
03:07And then that led on to...
03:10Are you going to take the whole house?
03:12I'm going to take the whole house.
03:13And then it led on to Weird Barbie's ambulance,
03:16which to my mind was like the creepy coop
03:19out of the Wacky Races.
03:21And I think that when they designed
03:23the creepy coop out of the Wacky Races,
03:24they looked at the weird,
03:25they looked at psycho.
03:26So you've kind of got this full circle.
03:28So I would take home Weird Barbie's ambulance.
03:31I said, hey, check me out, yeah, I'm just kidding.
03:37Well, I'll tell you what was difficult
03:39was the swimming pools, right?
03:41So the swimming pools,
03:44and it's like, you know,
03:44like David Hockney's swimming pools
03:46and all the lovely pools you have in LA
03:47that we never have in London
03:48because we're all indoors.
03:50You know, so it's this beautiful painted,
03:52scenically painted,
03:53and then we poured on this resin,
03:55this kind of clear resin
03:57that would give us our undulated surface.
03:59And the first time we did it,
04:01it looked great.
04:02We poured on the resin,
04:03and the resin, when it reacts with itself,
04:05got so hot,
04:07it kind of bleached and burned
04:10all the scenic art underneath,
04:12so we had to chip it all out and stuff again.
04:14That was a pain.
04:15Humans only have one ending.
04:17Get that Barbie!
04:21Ideas live forever.
04:22One day you're all blinded.
04:25One day you're all blinded.
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