Creating Barbie Land was so much more than picking out pinks and re-creating toys.
Instead, the duo behind the set design of "Barbie" say they interrogated the question: What is it that makes something a toy?
Production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer are longtime collaborators, known for their work on period dramas like "Atonement" and "Anna Karenina."
Their preparations for "Barbie" started simply: With the purchase of a Barbie Dreamhouse.
Their goal was to discover how a person plays with the house, Greenwood tells TODAY.com. From there, they intended to make a physical space that represented how moviegoers may have interacted with their own dolls.
The task, it turned out, was enormous. Greenwood and Spencer created an entire Barbie world with minimal CGI, meaning the set had to be made in 3D at the London studio where the movie was filmed, all while obeying the rules and strictures of Barbie Land. For example, Barbie has lights — but she doesn't have electricity. Meanwhile, the ocean is made of plastic — but Ryan Gosling's Ken swims in the sea.
"This film, for us, was the most philosophical, intellectual film we've ever done," Greenwood says. "But I think you can completely believe that when you put it against, it's a Greta Gerwig film. Why would it be any different?"
In an interview with TODAY.com Greenwood and Spencer, unpack how they created the physical world of "Barbie" and sorted through the logistical and philosophical quandaries it presented.
Inspiration, not replication
As they started their plans for "Barbie," Greenwood and Spencer say they didn't look to one Dreamhouse in particular from the decades-long evolution in Barbie style and architecture.
Instead, they purchased for the latest model, as the film is set in the present.
They also didn't set out to re-create any specific toy that exists on the market. While some of the dolls are perfect imitations of dolls from history — including discontinued dolls — the set was filled with an "interpretation" of a Dreamhouse, rather than a "replication," Spencer explains.
This gave them the freedom to "cherrypick" from across the Barbie anthology and lead with creating an overall feeling over scaling up an existing product.
Preserving a sense of play
Director Greta Gerwig had "lots of Barbies" growing up, Greenwood says. "She played with them a lot, until she was quite old," she adds, with a laugh.
In fact, the logo of the "Barbie" film is from the '80s, simply because "that was Greta's favorite," Spencer notes.
The movie, they say, is infused with Gerwig's own love of the doll.
"If you could go into Greta's mind when she was 8-year-old girl, she wanted to go to that block party," Greenwood says of Disco Barbie's dance scene. "It's the child's love of play that comes out throughout the film."
Greenwood says her own line of work may have its roots in the doll house her father bought for her.
"Everything is influenced by what you loved when you were growing up."
Katie Spencer
“Because I had a doll’s house when I was little, maybe that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. What we do is we play and we make believe,” she says.
"Everything we do is play, and everything is influenced by what you loved when you were growing up,” Spencer adds.
Why are the cars so small and the people so big? Understanding scale in 'Barbie'
Before the team could start drafting the specifics of Barbie Land's design, they had to capture the "feeling." Then, they could start to answer the "conundrums" the logic of play created.
One of the earliest observations the designers made was the unique scale of Barbie's world. She never perfectly fits in her cars, and her head almost touches the ceiling of each room she enters.
Mathematically, Greenwood and Spencer found that the equation for a Barbie-size house entails making it 23 percent smaller than normal proportions.
That formula helped create the outsized appearance of a real Barbie doll in relation to her surroundings. But at the same time, some materials were oversized relative to Barbie, like lipstick or her hairbrush.
"Little fingers couldn't hold them if they were scaled down," Spencer notes.
The construction of Barbie's bubble bath, a key set piece in the movie, proved especially complicated. There's no running water in Barbie Land, yet Barbie is surrounded by bubbles. To create the effect, the set designers hung the bubbles by wires from the ceiling, giving the appearance of being suspended in mid-air.
"The drawing looked like something out of a physics exam," Spencer says.
Greta Gerwig's 'squeal'
The production process occurred during a London winter. Outside it was often raining and dreary, but opening the dock doors to the set ushered in a "glow of pink," Spencer says.
“The final scene we did was Weird Barbie,” Spencer says. “You needed to do Weird Barbie at the end. You couldn’t have done her first.”
Once the set was finished, they brought Gerwig to see the full design for the first time. Normally, a director travels with a "gaggle" of people around.
"Somehow we managed that she went up on her own," Spencer says. "That was great, because we heard this squeal. We heard this little squeal."
