Noah Baumbach initially thought the idea of making a Barbie movie was "terrible."
Barbie was co-written by Baumbach and his partner Greta Gerwig who also directed, with Margot Robbie starring in the title role and Ryan Gosling featuring as Ken.
It became a remarkable success critically and commercially, eventually earning over $1.4 billion at the box office.
Barbie is officially the most successful movie ever with a female director at the helm.
But, Baumbach had his doubts.
“I thought it was a terrible idea and Greta signed me up for it,” he said in a conversation with Judd Apatow this week.
“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 gotta get us out of this.’ And then the pandemic happened…”
Gerwig intervened and imitated Baumbach, saying: “‘There’s no character and there’s no story, so why do you want to do this? There’s no entry point,’” before admitting: “And he’d do, like, side calls to try to get us out of it.”
Baumbach said the pandemic helped the writing process and that he came around after reading some of Gerwig's initial script pages.
“It was Barbie waking up in her Dreamhouse and coming out to her backyard and meeting somebody who was sick and dying,” he 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."
How much did Margot Robbie make from Barbie?
Robbie was one of the champions of the project from the get-go and got it off the ground via her production company. For starring and producing in Barbie, she earned a cool $50m, according to Variety.
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