How Those ‘Barbie’ Dreamhouses Came to Life: ‘We All Had to Believe in It’

While engaged on movies like “Atonement,” “Anna Karenina” and “Darkest Hour,” the manufacturing designer Sarah Greenwood and the set decorator Katie Spencer, each Oscar nominees many instances over, needed to flip soundstages into period-accurate units, utilizing their extraordinary consideration to element to embroider these areas with texture and soul.

And whereas these jobs had been demanding — if even one factor seemed improper, it may dispel the movie’s interval phantasm — they proved to be no match for the bright-pink studio comedy that’s Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.”

“It was one of the most difficult philosophical, intellectual, cerebral pieces of work we’ve ever done,” Greenwood advised me final week throughout a video name with Spencer. “How can that be? It’s ‘Barbie.’ But it really was.”

Then once more, because the movie works on a number of ranges, many issues about “Barbie” are headier than you would possibly anticipate: Though it’s a big-budget movie primarily based on a Mattel toy, Gerwig and her co-writer, Noah Baumbach, pose loads of important questions on life and womanhood all through. And within the visually dazzling Barbie Dreamhouses that Greenwood and Spencer designed — the place Margot Robbie, as Barbie, and Ryan Gosling, as Ken, carried out — even the smallest particulars within the background required many months of existential pondering.

“Everything is considered,” Spencer stated. “Absolutely everything.”

Though Gerwig got here on board the challenge as a bona fide Barbie aficionado, Greenwood and Spencer had no private historical past with the doll. “Neither of us had Barbie growing up,” Spencer stated. “I suppose we were like a lot of the population, quite judgmental about Barbie in a way.”

Still, captivated by Gerwig’s enthusiasm, the 2 girls threw themselves into intense analysis. Their directive was to protect a way of play, which is why Barbie’s residence has no stairs: Why would a doll deign to descend a flight of steps when she may take a round pink slide or, even higher, float gracefully down from the roof as if guided by the invisible hand of a kid?

“We all had to believe in it as much as if it was a space movie or period movie,” Spencer stated. “We had to research it as though it was set in 1780.”

First, the designers studied a classic Barbie Dreamhouse, discovering it to be way more cramped than they anticipated: A classically proportioned Barbie may graze the ceiling of every room with a easy upward swivel of her arm.

To simulate that really feel, “the Dreamhouses in the film are 23 percent smaller than they would be, as are the cars and roads,” Greenwood stated. “When you scale the house down, you make the actors like Margot and Ryan seem bigger, which makes the whole thing seem ‘toy.’”

Instead of adapting the Dreamhouses to really feel extra actual, Greenwood and Spencer performed up their surreality. When Barbie opens her fridge, a lot of the meals are merely flat cartoon decals. Her oversize cup comprises no liquid — why ought to it, when Barbies don’t drink? — and the dimensions of her toothbrush is much more exaggerated, because it’s the form of prop a toddler would possibly discover included in a dollhouse.

“Once you’ve done that once or twice, those moments of dollness, it makes the whole thing believable,” Spencer stated.

With few partitions to talk of, Barbie Dreamhouses are the definition of “open plan,” which offered its personal logistical issues. “You’re designing something that isn’t there, in effect,” stated Greenwood, who drew inspiration from museum dioramas to conjure layers of background that may assist fill every shot. Since our essential Barbies dwell in a cul-de-sac — in reality, it’s the dot of the “i” within the cursive roads that spell “Barbieland” — every Dreamhouse appears to be like out into a number of different Dreamhouses, whereas the blue sky and mauve mountains that encompass them had been hand-painted onto an 800-foot-long backdrop meant to recall old style soundstage musicals.

If it feels synthetic, that’s the purpose: Why protect the fourth wall for properties that hardly have any partitions to start with? “It’s fake-fake, which is perfect,” Greenwood stated. “It was almost Brechtian, the way Greta approached it.”

There is not any precise hearth in Barbie’s fire, nor water in her pool, since Barbieland is devoid of all parts and is as hermetically sealed as a toy field. There aren’t even whites, blacks or browns: Anything in a Dreamhouse that may sometimes be these colours is only a totally different shade of pink, with a main fuchsia so vivid that the manufacturing cleaned its paint provider out of each pail they’d.

“All the other colors, like the blues, had to up the ante,” Greenwood stated, referring to their depth.

The cul-de-sac Dreamhouses had been designed in a midcentury-modern type that evokes the time interval when Barbie was invented. “We kept coming back to the aesthetic of Palm Springs,” Spencer stated. In distinction to these properties, distinguished by clear and easy strains, was the postmodern home on a hill owned by Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) — a riot of bizarre angles and clashing colours, as if Pee-wee’s Playhouse emerged in the course of a rigorously constructed pop-up ebook.

“It was once a Dreamhouse, and it all went a little bit cockeyed, like her,” Greenwood stated. “Nothing there was straight, in any sense of the word.”

Like its proprietor, whose face is roofed in scribble marks, the partitions of Weird Barbie’s home are adorned in doodle patterns and swirls, and there are many different colours on show apart from pink. (The main shade on one wall is even, gasp, inexperienced.) The different Barbies deal with her domicile as if it had been a witch’s home, however you possibly can’t deny that Weird Barbie has a watch. Greenwood and Spencer singled out her irregular rainbow rug as a favourite that everybody hoped to take residence.

“We all wanted her rug, but it’s gone into the Warner Bros. vault of goods,” Spencer stated. “But I love the fact that in this vault where you have to go through so much security, you have the Batmobile and then you have Barbie’s car.”

Weird Barbie’s home isn’t the film’s solely deviation: Later within the story, after a visit to the true world suggestions off Ken to the ability of the patriarchy, he returns residence and exhorts the opposite Kens to show the pink and girlie Barbieland into their very own private “Ken-dom.” Soon sufficient, they’ve staged a hostile takeover of the Dreamhouses — rechristened the “Mojo Dojo Casa Houses” — and given these buildings a man-cave makeover replete with La-Z-Boys, mini fridges and appalling equestrian lampshades.

“We had to keep going back to Greta and saying, really? Really ugly?” Greenwood stated. “But there’s a purity to the ugliness as well, because it’s a limited palate.”

That’s as a result of these himbos aren’t certain the place all of their purloined swag should go, and even what most of it does. Barbecues have been positioned haphazardly onto ovens, the juicers are stuffed with Doritos, and flat-screen TVs in each Mojo Dojo Casa House are tuned to the identical hypnotically banal clip of a horse in everlasting gallop.

“He’s no interior designer, Ken,” Spencer said, chuckling. “But can I just say, a lot of the crew wanted to buy things from the Ken-dom. I’m not saying who, but a lot of them did.”

The film was shot last year at Warner Bros.’s Leavesden Studios, about 20 miles northwest of London, and as word of the colorful sets spread, the production quickly attracted its fair share of visitors. “We were filming in an English winter, gray and black with snow,” Greenwood said. “So everybody would just come in there for an injection of light and summer.”

Added Spencer: “It made people happy. You couldn’t help but smile.”

And what of its makers? Did all that time spent on these “Barbie” sets affect their personal palette? Yes, confessed Greenwood.

“I’ve painted my bedroom pink, literally,” she said. “I’d never painted anything pink before. I love pink now!”