The actor Greta Gerwig calls “the best”
Before the arrival of Barbie, Greta Gerwig had carved out a career for herself as one of the most prominent names in the mumblecore film genre in films such as Nights and Weekends. She then began collaborating with Noam Baumbach in the likes of Greenberg and Frances Ha before taking on the widely-admired Lady Bird and Little Women in a directing role.
While Gerwig already boasted a phenomenal career prior to Barbie, it’s arguable that that is now the movie for which she is best known, particularly from a mainstream perspective. With a great cast including Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling and some of modern cinema’s best set design, Gerwig managed to marry her independent sensibility to audience appeal on a mass scale.
In an interview with Letterboxd, Gerwig once named the films that inspired Barbie, and she pointed out the brilliance of the 1940 Howard Hawks screwball comedy His Girl Friday, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. The film tells of a newspaper editor who is on the precipice of losing his best reporter and ex-wife to another man.
Gerwig admired the fast-talking nature of Hawks’ film and called Grant “the best”. Responding to whether Grant might have been able to play Ken in her Barbie movie, the director admitted to the actor’s widespread talents, noting, “I think Cary Grant could make anything work, for sure. His Girl Friday is one of the best fast-talking movies of all time.”
There’s another film of Grant’s that Gerwig admires too, the 1940 romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story, directed by George Cukor and starring Grant, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart and Ruth Hussey. Grant’s clearly a big pull for Gerwig, but her love for Cukor’s film is also put down to the involvement of Hepburn, another favourite of the director.
“For The Philadelphia Story, one of the reasons I loved it—and I said to Margot to watch it for Barbie because Katharine Hepburn describes herself as being a Grecian statue or something—is she’s unflappable, and then she starts falling apart, and that’s actually where she finds herself,” Gerwig noted. “It was actually already one of Margot’s favourite movies; she already had that in her back pocket, as it were.”
Based on the 1939 Philip Barry play of the same name, The Philadelphia Story tells of Hepburn’s character, a wealthy socialite by the name of Tracy Lord, whose plans to marry are disrupted by the appearance of her ex-husband, C.K. Dexter Haven (played by Grant) and a tabloid journalist (Stewart). Check out the film’s trailer below.
