UNITED STATES – HOLLYWOOD
Starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, Barbie is the film of the summer of 2023 – competing, in a radically different genre, with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Who would have thought ten years ago that this $100 million film would be directed by independent film icon Greta Gerwig?
Just over ten years ago, it was as an actress that Greta Gerwig burst onto the screen. In Frances Ha (2012), directed by her husband Noah Baumbach, she plays a young woman in love and financial trouble in a big city. Many viewers recognise themselves in this tender, funny portrait, filmed in black and white. But some cinephiles had already spotted Greta Gerwig as a leading figure in the “mumblecore” movement – films that are a little off the cuff, essentially built around dialogue (“to mumble” means “to mumble”), in a spirit reminiscent of John Cassavetes. Greta Gerwig made her debut with tailor-made roles as an apprentice actress and screenwriter in the Duplass brothers’ Baghead (2008), and as a young adult ready to enter the workforce in Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stars (2007). It was with this director that she wrote and co-directed her first film – which she also co-starred in with Swanberg – Nights and Weekends (2008), about the long-distance relationship of a couple where he lives in Chicago, and she in New York.
While she also made a foray into more mainstream cinema (Ivan Reitman’s Sex Friends in 2011, Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love in 2012), her meeting with Noah Baumbach in 2010 marked the start of a rich collaboration: she starred in four of her husband’s films and co-wrote two, including Frances Ha. After 2016, she put her acting career on hold – apart from a role in Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, released in 2022 on Netflix, and a voice in Isle of Dogs (2018) by Wes Anderson, a close friend of the couple. From now on, she is above all a screenwriter and director.
Although she has often been known as a New Yorker in her roles, Greta Gerwig hails from Sacramento, in northern California. A youth spent between Catholic high school and artistic aspirations, dreams of theatre and East Coast universities (she ended up studying at Banard in New York). Her adolescence is recounted with melancholy in her autobiographical Lady Bird (2017), her first feature film written and directed by herself. In 2019, just as her new film, a very moving and ambitious adaptation of The Daughters of Dr March, hits theatres, the director is called upon to take the reins of a project that has already been in the pipeline for nearly ten years: a live-action adaptation of the world of Barbie dolls. Oscar-nominated for Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig has become one of the most prominent American filmmakers of her generation, able to offer a discourse in tune with the concerns of post-Me-Too society. Studios are snapping her up.
In the company of Noah Baumbach, hired as co-writer – the roles are reversed – Greta Gerwig set about writing Barbie during the confinement, claiming to enjoy “total freedom”. Meanwhile, for Disney, she is working on the script for a live-action adaptation of Snow White, directed by Marc Webb ((500) Days Together, The Amazing Spider-Man), scheduled for release in March 2024. Will an icon of independent cinema meet Hollywood for the better? Answer in cinemas, from July 19.
Barbie
In cinemas July 19