Noah Baumbach had no desire to take on the “Barbie” script.
The “White Noise” writer-director ultimately collaborated with partner Greta Gerwig for the Mattel-produced meta film about the famed doll and served as co-writer. However, Baumbach revealed during a special screening at the Writers Guild of America West (via Variety) that he at first thought it was a “terrible idea” to write “Barbie,” despite Gerwig agreeing to pen the script together.
“I thought it was a terrible idea and Greta signed me up for it,” Baumbach said. “I was just like, ‘I don’t see how this is going to be good at all.’ I kind of blocked it for a while and every time she’d bring it up, I’d be like, ‘You’ve got to get us out of this.’ And then the pandemic happened.”
According to Gerwig, Baumbach’s main qualm was that there wasn’t a story to Barbie.
“‘There’s no character and there’s no story, so why do you want to do this? There’s no entry point,’” Gerwig recalled Baumbach saying. “And he’d do, like, side calls to try to get us out of it.”
It was only after Gerwig presented Baumbach with the first pages of the script that she wrote when he decided it would be a project worth taking on.
“It was Barbie waking up in her Dreamhouse and coming out to her backyard and meeting somebody who was sick and dying,” Baumbach said. “I read these pages and I thought, ‘I understand now what this is.’ The movie is about embracing your mortality and about the mess of it all, so it was exciting.”
Baumbach added that the writing process with Gerwig was all about trying to “amuse each other and one up each other” with jokes.
“Then it was the most fun I think either of us have ever had, right?” Baumbach said to Gerwig onstage. “And then at a certain point, I was like, ‘I think this is the best thing we’ve ever written.’ I know enough always just to follow what Greta says, so even in my bellyaching and revolting, I kind of knew, ‘Well if she really believes it, then there’s something there.’”
Gerwig previously revealed that she agreed to work with “Barbie” producer and lead actress Margot Robbie before notifying Baumbach.
“[Margot] came to me and said, ‘Would you be interested in writing this?’” Gerwig recalled. “And I said, ‘Yes!’ And then I said, ‘And Noah would like to write it too.’ And I had not really talked to Noah about this.”
Gerwig continued, “I don’t know! I think I had a six-month-old baby when I said yes? And I wasn’t necessarily running everything by him…It was in March of 2020 that Noah said, ‘Are we meant to be writing a ‘Barbie’ movie?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘I don’t have any ideas for that! Why didn’t you sign us up to write a different thing?’ And I was like, ‘Because I have a feeling. I like Margot and I have a feeling.’”
