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To fully realize Barbie Land, Greta Gerwig enlisted the expertise of Production Designer Sarah Greenwood and Set Decorator Katie Spencer, both six-time Oscar nominees for their work together on films like “Atonement,” “Anna Karenina,” and “Darkest Hour.”
Neither owned a Barbie Dreamhouse as a kid, so they bought one to study. Accordingly, they adjusted the scale of the set to match its unrealistic dimensions. Gerwig noted:
“The ceiling is actually quite close to one’s head, and it only takes a few paces to cross the room. It has the odd effect of making the actors seem big in the space but small overall.”
It wasn’t just the Mattel back catalog that provided inspiration. The midcentury modernist architecture of Palm Springs and the style of “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” also contributed to the film’s overwhelmingly kitschy look. To complete the effect, the backdrop of sky and mountains was hand-painted rather than rendered in CGI, and important detail for Gerwig: “Everything needed to be tactile, because toys are, above all, things you touch.”
The movie made headlines recently for causing a global shortage of fluorescent pink paint, produced by Rosco, a manufacturer that supplies Hollywood. Greenwood’s claim that “the world ran out of pink” was substantiated by Lauren Proud, the company’s Vice President of Global Marketing, albeit with a caveat. While she confirmed that the “Barbie” production had “used as much paint as we had,” she also added that stockpiles were already pretty low in the wake of the pandemic and other supply chain issues. So there is the full story, although it is probably more fun to play make-believe, like I did all those years ago when I sent my sister’s Barbies on their daring missions to Castle Grayskull, and pretend “Barbie” was solely responsible for a world shortage of garish pink paint.
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