She co-wrote and directed the highest-grossing movie of the year, but to Vanity Fair, Greta Gerwig explains the movie’s runaway success was certainly not a sure thing.

“I always had a hope that it would connect. I had a sense that it might. But Barbie doesn’t fit neatly into a preordained category,” she admits. 

“We had these hopeful-looking metrics, but no one knew what they meant. It wasn’t until the end of the second weekend that I thought, ‘Oh, this is going well.'”

She adds, “I mean, Wonder Woman was hugely successful, but superheroes exist in a different bubble.”

The filmmaker expresses she wasn’t about to let studio execs change what she had in mind for the genre-bending Margot Robbie–Ryan Gosling hit. “Honestly, there was nothing but fear around all of it from the outset,” she says adding, ” … the whole undertaking was definitely like ‘Drive it like you stole it.’ Go, go, go. Don’t tell them, don’t tell them where we’re going.”

She also admits to being “chuffed” at the Barbenheimer phenomenon, calling Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan “one of my heroes, a proper auteur.” 

Greta says, “It was an odd pairing, but it’s kind of like a film festival where you watch three movies a day.”

With Barbie‘s success now in the record books, however, Gerwig says she still can’t bring herself to read any reviews. “I’ll probably sit down with a binder [of them] sometime in February,” she says. “But right now it’s too fresh.”

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