How the making of the ‘Barbie’ movie left “the world” without the color pink

It could not be otherwise. The new Barbie movie‘had to be pink, very pink. And it has been so much that it has ended with the reserves of pink paint that a company had for the whole world. This has been told, with a certain tone of irony, by the creative producer of the film, Sarah Greenwoodin an interview with ‘Architectural Digest’ and it has been confirmed by the vice president of global marketing of the painting company Rosco, the one chosen to paint fuchsia the fantasy of the doll taken to the big screen. “They have left us with nothing,” said Lauren Proud. “We’ve given them all the paint we could get our hands on.”

The movie ‘Barbie’, which premieres in Spain July 21, carries with it a huge amount of pink. And not just any kind, but a fluorescent pink shade. “I wanted the pink to be very brightthat everything was even too much”, has explained the director of the film Greta Gerwig in the interview with this magazine specialized in design and decoration. His idea was literally “to create the alternate universe of Barbieland”, with all the “artificiality” that entails. And it is that Gerwig’s intention was “not to forget” what made her love Barbie when she was little: all that artificial, tactile and, above all, pink world.

Not only the mansions recreated in the film, but every bed, every closet, every piece of furniture and every accessory is pink. And not only that, but also this color abounds outside the houses: in the car that the protagonists drive (Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie), the roads, the ground where they walk and even the streetlights that light the way. Everything, colored in a garish fuchsia pink that floods the scene and whose aesthetic wants to remind us of that “childhood” that the director remembers.

Was ‘Barbie’ the one who did away with the pink paint… or not?

Sarah Greenwood was the production designer behind turn that pink idea into reality. And it was she, six times nominated for an Oscar, who insisted on how the production of ‘Barbie’ ended the world ‘stock’ of this particular color. “The world ran out of rose“, he pointed out, referring to the painting of this fluorescent shade by the Rosco company.

Nevertheless, it hasn’t been that simple. Rosco’s own vice president of marketing, Proud, has explained to the ‘Los Angeles Times’ that there were other circumstances behind this situation. During the production of ‘Barbie’, which took place in 2022, the effects of the pandemic were seen, which caused a bottleneck in the supply chain It affected a large number of products, including Rosco’s paint.

In addition to this, the company was recovering from the effects of a severe frost that covered Texas in early 2021, which brought production of this color to a standstill due to the lack of necessary materials to produce it. As a consequence, the entity was operating with less paint of this type than it was used to. “We gave them all the pink we could,” Proud said. “But they left us with nothing”.

like in a dollhouse

Gerwig’s intention was to try to recreate what her childhood had been like, as she herself remembers it. And in Barbie’s ‘dream house’ “there is no place for the timid”: just like in the dollhouse, in the movie “there are no walls and no doors, since “it is assumed that no need for privacyThere’s no reason to hide.”

The film tries to move the world of original barbie in a ‘live action’ with people of flesh and blood. For it, bought a Barbie house on Amazon and they studied it. “The scale was a bit strange,” explained Katie Spencer, responsible for the setting of the film’s sets, telling how they imitated the rooms and adjusted them to make the recording. “The ceiling was super close to the head and with a few steps you could cross the whole room”, the artist has pointed out. It had the strange effect of making the actors look very big in the scene, but at the same time small, as if they were in a doll’s house.

To bring this world of dolls to the big screen, Gerwig, Greenwood and Spencer were inspired by the mid-century modernist aesthetic in Palm Springs, included in the Kaufmann House, an architectural project designed by Richard Neutra in the mid-1940s. “Everything at that time was perfect.”