This week, 60 Minutes featured director, actress and screenwriter Greta Gerwig.
Her latest film, the blockbuster “Barbie,” was the highest-grossing film of last year, grossing more than $1 billion worldwide.
When she was tapped to write and direct the film, Gerwig tapped her work and life partner, filmmaker Noah Baumbach. Baumbach, who has written and directed critically acclaimed independent dramas like “The Squid and the Whale” and “Marriage Story,” was a little nonplussed by the idea of a Barbie movie.
“I couldn’t even imagine it,” he said. “And Greta wrote these pages… and I thought, ‘I can write this movie about Barbie. I totally understand what it is.’”
In an interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, Baumbach and Gerwig talked about working on “Barbie,” their approach to screenwriting and why their partnership works. And Alfonsi tried to learn more about a “Barbie” sequel.
Gerwig explains that the film begins “very mechanically… like clockwork” with Barbie and her friends enjoying a perfect day in Barbie Land. And then suddenly, an existential crisis hits: Barbie asks, “Do you ever think about death?”
This moment in the film is the end result of a writing process that began with Gerwig writing a few early pages of the script and showing them to Baumbach. In those early pages, Barbie meets an old woman in her garden and is confronted with the idea of her own mortality.
“Noah immediately understood what I was doing and said, ‘You know, this is exciting and there’s a movie in this,’” Gerwig explained.
The screenwriting duo also revealed how their writing process influences their approach to directing. Both Gerwig and Baumbach said they prefer to stick exactly to what is written in the script without any substitutions on set when shooting the film.
Gerwig said that in the films “Lady Bird” and “Little Women,” everything was written, down to the “you know” and “uh.” She added that this level of detail is important to maintaining the rhythm of a conversation that was written and read aloud hundreds of times before the first frame was shot.
“Once we have something that looks more like a script, we start reading it out loud,” she explains. “We check the language ourselves, to see if there’s a joke that’s repeated or a rhythm that’s off.”
Baumbach and Gerwig said that when writing the “Barbie” script, they always had Ryan Gosling in mind to play Ken, even writing his full name next to Ken’s lines in the first draft.
When writing the role of Ken, Baumbach and Gerwig had a host of ideas that they couldn’t incorporate into their final draft. In an earlier draft of the script, they explored the “Ken effect” in the real world in more detail and wrote a scene for the film in which Ryan Gosling plays himself.
“We had way too much material for Ken. We were writing, writing, writing,” Gerwig said. Baumbach interrupted and told him not to “give it all away.”
Alfonsi asked, “Will there ever be a Ken movie?” Gerwig laughed and said she couldn’t comment on that, but wouldn’t rule it out completely.
“I mean, the truth is, you know, I guess we’ll see,” she said with a smile.
The video above was originally posted on December 3, 2023. It was produced and edited by Will Croxton.
