La Belle noiseuse

It was an obsession of mine to really portray the act of painting. What does it mean to create? What does it mean to gaze? I was very much inspired by *La Belle Noiseuse* by Jacques Rivette, for example, which is a film about a painter and his model. It’s also about the process of creation. It was very important for me, the idea of having a film about a painter and a model, and dealing with the process of the gaze, and going against the male gaze that’s usually in these types of films.

Greta Gerwig has said she watched Jacques Demy's 1964 French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a film where every word is sung, every surface is saturated with color, and understood immediately what Barbieland should be: a world where artifice isn't dishonesty, it's the only language adequate to feeling. Demy's films are devastating precisely because they're beautiful. The same sadness hides inside Barbie.