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Greta Gerwig may be coming off a record-breaking year with box office smash Barbie but the screenwriter and director has revealed she is feeling intimidated by her next project, the adaptation for Netflix of C.S. Lewis children’s classic The Chronicles Of Narnia.
“I’m slightly in the place of terror because I really do have such reverence for Narnia,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today program. “I loved Narnia so much as a child. As an adult, C.S. Lewis is a thinker and a writer. I’m intimidated by doing this. It’s something that feels like a worthy thing to be intimidated by.”
“As a non-British person, I feel a particular sense of wanting to do it correctly… it’s like when Americans do Shakespeare, there’s a slight feeling of reverence and as if maybe we should treat it with extra care. It is not our countryman.”
Gerwig was speaking just three days after Barbie won the Golden Globes’ inaugural Cinematic and Box Office Achievement award for its stellar $1.442 billion global gross in 2023.
“It was very wonderful and emotional to be able to take to the stage with the groups that made it,” she said of the honor.
“It felt very fitting… for all of us, the thing that we wanted most of all was to connect with people and to have people share an experience in the cinemas, in the movie theatres. It felt like even though this is a brand new award, it felt like it was the award to honor that and that was always what we wanted to do.”
Golden Globes comedian host Jo Koy was panned for a line on Sunday evening in which he compared Barbie to Oppenheimer saying the latter film “is based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project, and Barbie is on a plastic doll with big boobies.”
Quizzed on her thoughts on the line, Gerwig was unfazed.
“Well, he’s not wrong. She’s the first doll that was mass produced with breasts, so he was right on. And you know, I think that so much of the project of the movie was unlikely because it is about a plastic doll… Barbie by her very construction has no character, no story, she’s there to be projected upon,” she said.
“The insight that [Barbie creator] Ruth Handler had when she was watching her daughter play with baby dolls, is she realised, ‘My daughter doesn’t want to pretend to be a mother. She wants to pretend to be a grown woman,’” she said.
“Barbie has been around since 1959… she’s been a villain and she’s been a hero, but it felt like in a way even though it’s so seemingly superficial that it was such a rich place to start.”
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