Greta Gerwig names the 33 movies that inspired ‘Barbie’
The director behind the long-anticipated Barbie movie, Greta Gerwig, has shared 33 classic films that inspired the making of her new project.
Her new movie, which stars Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and a massive ensemble cast of some of the most celebrated actors in contemporary cinema, is adapted from the range of Barbie toys created by American businesswoman Ruth Handler in 1959. In a conversation with Letterboxd, Gerwig discussed the making of her new movie, giving insight into her own extensive knowledge of cinema history.
Her curated watchlist of titles includes arthouse classics like Stanley Kubrick’s iconic science fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey and Max Ophüls’ gorgeous romance The Earrings of Madame de, as well as mainstream favourites such as Peter Weir’s The Truman Show and Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz.
Speaking about The Wizard of Oz, an iconic movie in the history of the moving image, Gerwig stated: “It does something that I wanted to emulate, which is these incredible sound stages and these painted skies and this sense of… I say, ‘authentically artificial’, which I think is very beautiful and emotional. I think of the painted backdrop of the Emerald City as they go towards it. In our movie, we have the Pink Brick Road instead of the Yellow Brick Road”.
Elsewhere, Gerwig shed some light on her fondness for The Truman Show: “I had to include The Truman Show both because I watched it again before I made this movie, and because Peter Weir very generously got on the phone with me before I started shooting, and he talked to me for a long time about how he shot it and how they made it work”.
Take a look at the full list of the 33 movies that inspired Greta Gerwig’s Barbie below:
The 33 movies that inspired the making of ‘Barbie’
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
- All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)
- An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951)
- And the Ship Sails On (Federico Fellini, 1983)
- The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (Frank Marshall, 2020)
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)
- The Earrings of Madame de… (Max Ophüls, 1953)
- Gold Diggers of 1935 (Busby Berkeley, 1935)
- Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978)
- The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
- Heaven Can Wait (Warren Beatty, Buck Henry, 1978)
- His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)
- The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)
- A Matter of Life and Death (Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell, 1946)
- Model Shop (Jacques Demy, 1969)
- Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)
- Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958)
- Oklahoma! (Fred Zinnemann, 1955)
- Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (Tim Burton, 1985)
- The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)
- PlayTime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
- Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
- The Red Shoes (Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell, 1948)
- Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977)
- Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952)
- Splash (Ron Howard, 1984)
- The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998)
- Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934)
- The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)
- Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)
- The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
- Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)
- The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1964)
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