Barbie director Greta Gerwig says she wasn’t allowed Barbie dolls as a child

Film’s co-writer and director says on Radio 4 that her mother initially stopped her from having a Barbie doll

Barbie is on course to be the biggest movie of 2023 and could dominate the awards season, but its director, Greta Gerwig, has admitted her childhood memories of the doll were not as perfectly pink and positive as might be imagined.

Her mother initially stopped Gerwig from having a Barbie doll, concerned that it reinforced female stereotypes.

“My mom wasn’t so into Barbie,” Gerwig told Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. “Certain moms, they would be like: ‘I don’t know if this is a good example of womanhood,’ the body type and everything … she was less excited about that.

“But I got hand-me-downs from girls in the neighbourhood where I was growing up and so I got a lot of pre-loved dolls. Although my mom, I will give her credit, she did give me a doll, a proper doll, for Christmas, in a box. She relented and then I destroyed her [Barbie].”

Barbie, a satire, is the highest grossing movie of 2023, making $1.4bn at the box office. Last week it dominated the nominations at the 81st Golden Globe awards. It is up for nine awards, making it the second-most nominated film ever at the Globes, second to Nashville, which had 11 nominations in 1976.

Gerwig, who directed Barbie and co-wrote it with her partner, Noah Baumbach, is up for best director.

The film was released in July on the same day as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, leading to an unlikely Barbenheimer phenomenon in which some people watched the two films on the same day.

Gerwig was asked what it was like to be caught up in “the cultural phenomenon of the year”. She said: “It was such an extraordinary moment when it was released and came into the world. And then there was this overwhelming sense of everyone’s going to the movies again.

“For me, so much of when Noah Baumbach and I wrote the script, and what was the dream of making it, was really this hope of everyone being in cinemas again. And that was because we wrote it during – we started really writing it in March of 2020 and there was no movies.

“We weren’t gathering and I kind of thought, well, if we ever do this again, let’s make the most bananagrams thing they’ll let us get away with that you would want to be together for.”

Gerwig, whose films include Lady Bird and Little Women, will be the president of the 77th Cannes film festival jury next year.

On Desert Island Discs she spoke about how music had influenced her work and she chose the David Bowie song Moonage Daydream as one of her discs.

Gerwig said: “I truly think if David Bowie hadn’t existed I wouldn’t have made anything.”

She said she was 18 when she first heard Bowie’s music. “It’s like it tripped some wire in me that had always been there and then I was like: there it is, it’s Bowie.”

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