Sarah Greenwood: From Narnia to Barbieland
Sunday, March 17, 2024 at 8:00PM 
Gerwig and Greenwood discuss BARBIE in a behind-the-scenes video. | © Warner Bros.Last Sunday, Sarah Greenwood officially became the most nominated production designer without an Oscar, breaking her tie with Nathan Crowley for the "Diane Warren" distinction. This year, she was nominated for Barbie, another triumph among many in a career spanning 1980s BBC miniseries to 21st-century Hollywood blockbusters.
Though many of her best works rely on a sense of material realism, the Greta Gerwig feature aimed for a sort of "authentic artificiality" where denying reality is a sort of reality into itself. For Greenwood, midcentury Palm Springs was a source of real-world inspiration to combine with Mattel's history, adding a sense of internal logic to Barbieland. Moreover, the aesthetic was sustained by old-school techniques like hand-painted backdrops and a practical fake sea, visible wires holding everything together in the loopy transitions between worlds. She used scale as a tool for wonderment, took cues from Gene Kelly musicals, and delivered a screen dream in fifty shades of fuchsia. Indeed, her team used so much pink paint that they caused an international shortage…