Greta Gerwig covers the current digital issue of Elle UK. The shoot is very… British. That’s not a slam nor a compliment, it’s just a statement of fact. They made her look like a lady who lunches (in London). They made her look like she’s one of King Charles’s goddaughters and she also might have had an affair with him when she was 19 and platinum blonde. Gerwig’s interview is in support of Barbie, which she co-wrote and directed. The details about the movie are slim, but that’s not even the point anymore. Some highlights:
She didn’t play with Barbies growing up: ‘My mom wasn’t crazy about Barbie. It wasn’t something that felt, necessarily, approved, which made it more intriguing.’ Her family didn’t have a TV, she wasn’t allowed to wear logos: this was not a world of Barbie Dream House-style all-American consumerism. ‘Part of the reason I think I was so intrigued [by this project] is because, not even intellectually, but from deep inside, I understand the counter-arguments. That feels rich.’
She hopes the film subverts sexist stereotypes. Barbie, she says, is, ‘literally plastic. She’s unchanging. If you threw her out, she just wouldn’t disintegrate. If I could give that persona some humanity, some falling-apart-ness, that – in and of itself – would be be meaningful… In this sort of double mirror of the movie, Margot Robbie is also a person we expect to be perfect. What does that mean that we also do that? Is she allowed to fall apart and be vulnerable?’
Biblical inspirations: ‘It starts off in a place where there is no aging, no death, no shame, no separation. That’s an oldie but a goodie. Because I went to Catholic school, that story of Eve and Adam suddenly realising they are naked really stuck with me,’ she says. She talks about John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the idea that there is no poetry without pain.
She just had her second baby: She retires to a private room to pump a bottle of breast milk, which is handed to her assistant, between the shoot and the interview. ‘I’m about to be 40. And there’s something about that where you’re like: Oh! I’m properly middle aged now.’ All parts of life feel extremely activated.’ She shows me a picture of her baby on her lap, at his four-month checkup the previous day. ‘He’s a little Schmoo. I don’t know if you can tell energy from the picture, but that’s very much his energy. He’s a wise little baby…. The little guy is sleeping through the night. But I’m still doing that thing where I wake up, every hour to 90 minutes, and just hover. You just keep wanting to look at that baby. So I’m slightly in a twilight state.’
She wore the same boiler suit, in different colours, every day on the ‘Barbie’ set: Now, she says, as she approaches her forties, ‘I want to start being more playfully outrageous.’ She talks about how fun it was to wear long nails and high heels for our shoot. ‘I don’t want to be 80 and look back and say I could have really done it, from 40 to 60, but I chose to be practical! But we will see how far I get with this,’ she says. Either way, it feels as though she is grabbing the current moment with both hands. ‘I’ll probably look back and say, “That was a really an amazing time. And I don’t know how all of it was possible.” But it’s filled with a lot of happiness.’
[From Elle UK]
The second baby is months old and Greta has been wearing shapeless sack dresses throughout the promotion, so it’s not like it’s huge breaking news that she gave birth before the Barbie promotion started. I like how low-key this announcement was though – like, oh by the way, I need to go pump because my baby is four months old. No one pressed her about it either, no one was really talking about it at all. I do wonder about her relationship with Noah Baumbach, especially given that he left Jennifer Jason Leigh when their son was just months old and he abruptly took up with Greta, and now Greta just had two babies back-to-back. I don’t know! It just feels…like none of my business, I know.
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Cover & IG courtesy of Elle UK.
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