Greta Gerwig has said the Barbenheimer phenomenon made it feel like “everyone was going to the movies again”.
The Barbie film, directed and co-written by Gerwig, was released in July on the same day as the Christopher Nolan epic Oppenheimer, leading to a nickname that merged the film titles together.
On BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, host Lauren Laverne asked the American filmmaker what it felt like to be caught up in, what some had called, “the cultural phenomenon of the year”.
Gerwig said: “It was such an extraordinary moment when it was released and came into the world.
“And then there was this overwhelming sense of everyone’s going to the movies again.
“For me, so much of when Noah Baumbach and I wrote the script, and what was the dream of making it, was really this hope of everyone being in cinemas again.
“And that was because we wrote it during – we started really writing it in March of 2020 and there was no movies.
“We weren’t gathering and I kind of thought, well if we ever do this again let’s let’s make the most bananagrams thing they’ll let us get away with that you would want to be together for.”
The 40-year-old, who has also directed the Oscar winning film Lady Bird, starring Saoirse Ronan, and the 2019 adaptation of Little Women, said her mother was not “so into” Barbie when she was growing up.
“My mum wasn’t so into Barbie. Certain mums, they would be like ‘I don’t know if this is a good example of womanhood’, the body type and everything… she was less excited about that,” she said.
“But I got hand-me downs from girls in the neighbourhood where I was growing up and so I got a lot of pre-loved dolls.
“Although my mum, I will give her credit, she did give me a doll, a proper doll for Christmas in a box. She relented and then I destroyed her (Barbie).”
Also on the radio programme, Gerwig spoke about how music had influenced her work and chose David Bowie song Moonage Daydream to be in her Desert Island Discs.
The director said: “I truly think if David Bowie hadn’t existed I wouldn’t have made anything.”
She added: “I didn’t hear David Bowie until I was in college when I was like 18 and I couldn’t believe that it existed.
“It’s like it tripped some wire in me that had always been there and then I was like, there it is, it’s Bowie.”
Gerwig’s Barbie movie, starring Margot Robbie as the blonde Mattel doll and Ryan Gosling as her boyfriend Ken, became a box office hit following its release.
The dual offerings of Barbie and Oppenheimer prompted the biggest weekend for UK cinema-going since 2019, according to the UK Cinema Association.
It was recently announced that Gerwig will become the first female director to be named jury president for next year’s Cannes Film Festival.
The festival noted in a statement that at 40, Gerwig had become the youngest person to take on that role since Sophia Loren, who headed the Cannes jury in 1966 aged 31.
Desert Island Discs airs on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4, Sunday at 11.15am.