The Red Shoes

For 'High Heels', I thought of some classic melodramas... I also thought about musicals. For example, 'The Red Shoes' (1948) by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, for the ambition and passion in art, and its tragic elements.

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.

Darren Aronofsky screened Ingmar Bergman's Persona and John Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence for Natalie Portman before filming began, these are the films that showed him how to make a psychological breakdown feel bodily. Bergman's Persona is the direct model: an identity that dissolves under pressure, two women who begin to merge. The horror in Black Swan is Bergman horror, no monsters, just the face.