‘Barbie’: How Weird Barbie’s House Design Was Inspired by ‘Psycho’
26.07.2023 - 18:53
/ variety.com
Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor SPOILER ALERT: This contains spoilers from “Barbie,” now playing in theaters. “Barbie” Production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer reckon that by this time next year, there will be a pendulum swing and no one will want to go near the color pink. But for now, it’s Barbie’s world and everyone, everywhere is obsessed. Greenwood says Greta Gerwig, Mattel and producers Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley gave her and Spencer a free hand when it came to building the world.
“That was great and scary because it was like, ‘Oh, right, now we’ve got to go and figure it out,” Greenwood says. With Barbie’s Dreamhouse, they weren’t looking to recreate the Mattel Dreamhouse — rather, they wanted to refine what that looked like. Says Greenwood, “We looked at the Dreamhouse over the past 60 years, what was in the script, and how to get the toyness of it.
Subsequently, we learned Mattel had a term ‘toyetics.’” In studying the vintage houses, they realized the doll inside the house was bigger and that “the scale was off-kilter. So we reduced everything by 23%,” says Greenwood. “When Margot is in the house, she could touch the roof and she’s too big for the car, and we set certain rules around that” and built their interpretation of that to bring Barbie’s Dreamhouse to life.
In the house, Robbie would appear larger than in a real-life situation. As with the majority of the movie, everything was built on soundstages with 360-degree sets which allowed Gerwig and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto to fully capture the environment. Greenwood says, in the end, the house measured “50 foot high and 800 foot long” with ceilings added in to enhance the toyness of the world.