Barbie swept the world over the summer and the momentum has not slowed down. The music in Greta Gerwig’s film has become somewhat of its own iconic character as people continue to discuss the film and the story it tells. Our Artisan Editor, Jillian Chilingerian, sat down with the composers behind the score, Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, to discuss working with Greta Gerwig, creating a score that embraces the original songs, and the possibility of a Barbie concert!

Jillian Chilingerian: Hello to both of you, I’m very excited to be chatting with you about Barbie and the music especially. I’m a big fan of both of you.
Mark Ronson: Oh, that’s awesome. Thank you so much,
Andrew Wyatt: We’re happy to be here. Honored to be apart of it.

Jillian Chilingerian: Both of you have such impressive musical achievements outside of film and now you’re stepping in to compose a full-length feature film that has become a cultural landmark of our time. How was that making that transition to composing?
Andrew Wyatt: Mark, I think he just talks the most.
Mark Ronson: He’s the quiet genius and I’m the loudmouth. So basically, it started with us doing these two songs and then we wrote Dance the Night and I’m Just Ken. We went to the editing bay pretty early, and we noticed that when Greta was watching the battle scene, she had just looped the middle section of Ken over and over again to the point where I was like, “How is this not driving you crazy to just watch this.” It was just like, the middle and it was for seven minutes and we’re like, listen, can you just give us this segment and we’ll just write some music in the middle? We weren’t trying to get a scoring gig or anything. It was more just like out of our professional pride. We did some stuff with that and we worked on two different movements and we came up with some themes that ended up being the score and Greta loved it. She was kind of like “Well, what would you do with this intro bit right here?” So then she gave us the opening title sequence where Barbie wakes up and she’s having her perfect day to the end credits and we wrote something there that it became the Lizzo song but we had written all the music and then I wrote a song on top of it so it just luckily, in the beginning, came in chunks but I think once we had an idea of what Greta loved which was a mixture of this really fun slightly more artificial bit of heartfelt found in Barbie Land but then also mixed with the real emotion the orchestra sort of conjures for the real world and well, she was liking the world that we were making and then that just led to more.
Andrew Wyatt: Just as Mark said. We’re both big fans of all kinds of music whether it’s been used fully in our lexicon of what we’ve been doing for the last few years in pop music, or not, I think we were kind of also dying to get our hands on like doing some bigger orchestral stuff. Once we knew that Greta wanted us to work on other scenes that were in the movie, I think before the terror of having done this thing for the first time for like a movie that was turning out to be such a big thing before our eyes even before the film came out. We were just excited about the opportunity to try to use those chops that we both have and maybe don’t get to use as much during like a session with some pop artists sometimes everything you do informs everything else you do. Mark and I have both been doing this a long time and once you can find a new challenge that makes you feel like the kid in the candy shop again, like when you hear a sound for the first time and it makes you very excited. It’s like quite a magical thing to be able to do. We knew at least everyone was talking about it, so there was a certain amount of fear about that, but there was also just so much excitement and love for soundtracks and orchestral music.
Mark Ronson: We don’t get to write arrangements to do stuff with orchestra and all the pop stuff but with Back to Black or the song I do with Miley, Nothing Breaks Like a Heart like that is always the most gratifying part of the recording and just like experience, really get the final tag when you sit with the orchestra in your workout, the arranger and then these people bring your thing to life and of course we get such a buzz when we’re sitting writing a song and we write something that strikes a chord, you feel that your hair standing up, it’s a beautiful feeling as well when it’s just the two of us but when you’re really in front of the orchestra or choir and the things that we got to do on this and like just going off of something that Andrew said, Greta certainly wasn’t going to put her baby in the hands of some novices that she didn’t think worthy. We were certainly proving ourselves every step of the way. We’re forever in her debt for taking a chance on us as she believed in us all the way and we were of course things like the last scene with this song called I Don’t Have an Ending on the score, which is when she’s there learning what it’s like to be human we wrote that we knew that was such an important scene. We were so moved by it and knew that we had a responsibility to the film to not leave the scene alone until we had written however many versions it took to get it right but she was so supportive, and we were texting her a little music ideas and motifs in the middle of the night. She texts back like Noah’s crying right now or this is great. She would go in the edit suite the next day with Susanna, the music editor or Nick and they would move it around like that’s how the Mattel theme or when she’s ascending the stairs up to Weird Barbie. Those weren’t even necessarily always where we wrote it, but she just was like, “Oh, that’d be great” She just had great ideas of where to put this because no one knows this movie better than she does.

Jillian Chilingerian: The music enhances so much of the experience when we’re on this journey with Barbie. One of my favorite scenes is the Mattel scene and it is this unspoken comedy or emotion. Touching upon this, with those notes from Greta is when you’re approached with such an incredible script, and it’s almost your role to bring to light the unspoken points of the director’s vision.
Andrew Wyatt: Greta has this phrase that she talks about. One of the first meetings we had once we were starting to present her with themes and stuff for other parts of the movie and she said something about being inside the same dream with whoever or just knowing when we’re both we’re both in the same dream like the composer and the or the composers in this case, and the director is in the same dream. Anytime you are working with even an artist you want to bring out what they’re trying to do and that’s your job is to try to support what they’re doing and make sure it has the maximum impact that it can have. When you are first dealing with that, you don’t know what it’s almost like a prayer that you’re gonna like get to where it needs to be and everything will be okay. With all your skills and all of your experience, you still have to find out what’s going to work for this and make this special. Trial, error, labor and just believing in the project and trying to open yourself up to feel the magic of every scene so that when you play the right note it rings like a bell that you’re on the right track. We had many situations where I wouldn’t know if it was the right thing, but Mark would come up behind me and say that’s right, keep going down that path, or Mark would be playing a chord progression, I’d say no. We bounced off of each other that way, and that was very helpful.
Mark Ronson: Also, one really important thing is that when we saw when we had those first two things that Greta loved and she gave us like a few little scenes and what we tried to do is because we had never maybe scored a film like this before. We wrote in his very micro way to the scene like literally just scored 30 seconds while only thinking about what was going on and I think that we realized that didn’t play to any of our strengths as songwriters and composers like we think in terms of melody and theme and emotion. So Susanna, the music editor was like stop thinking in these micro ways of like 30 seconds, write a two-minute song, even if this seems only 15 seconds, write a two-minute piece of music and a movement that you would imagine talking to the scene and that’s kind of how what we have so had to think of it to get back in a way that wasn’t so so far removed from the way that we’ve approached music for the past 30 years in our lives, so that was a wonderful advice that we got from Susanna as well.

Jillian Chilingerian: It sounds like you have to use the skills that you already have but then unlock new skills. So it’s fascinating to hear how you would envision or put together the full story because we’re going from a surrealist place of being introduced to Barbie land that is almost grounded as if this is a reality and it allows us as the audience to trust this journey we’re about to go on to and then it kind of shifts into this identity crisis.
Andrew Wyatt: The flat feet and weird Barbie, there’s exposition about what’s going to kind of set her on her journey. It needs to intimate on a perpetual motion. That is beyond the individual’s control, then you get to how it happens and why you make the certain decisions you make and if there’s a real answer for it, except that you just write what feels emotionally right and that’s what I meant about like being in the same dream with the director where it’s beyond like what you could say in language and that’s why what you can’t say with language, you can sometimes say in music appear.
Mark Ronson: It’s true. When you get the film, and it’s tempted with little bits and pieces from the greatest scores of the last 30 years. It could be anything from Carter Burwell to John Williams, to John Bryan to whoever and there’s just all these pieces of everybody else’s music and out of context. Each one of those pieces sounds like the most impressive piece of music that you’ve ever heard and you’re like, Well, how am I going to compete with that like you want me to just like best all of these people, but then once this, you start to have your themes. It brings us cohesion to the story as this was the first time it was when when Greta would come back from a screening and go “Oh Will is testing much higher now”. It must have something to do with that now being you’re like, wow, okay, I really understand and then watching the film was getting better all the time as Nick and Greta were editing because we just loved the film so much. We had so much respect for Greta and we wanted to be bringing that apple for the teacher every day like when we were here that we were helping her for the team. It was gratifying.
Andrew Wyatt: I agree. I’m gonna cop to that. Bringing the apple for the teacher.

Jillian Chilingerian: This score and the soundtrack, I remember after watching it I cried for like two days straight and it just hit me in a way that like I love music and like there’s like certain sounds that just really get you in this like just had me reflecting on my entire life. I got a perspective on girlhood, identity, mothers, and daughters.
Mark Ronson: I remember going into the editing suite and they were in the middle of editing early on that scene where she’s on the soundstage and they’re standing on the clouds when she’s holding her hand telling her what it’s gonna be like to be human. I only saw like literally a still of that because it was paused and I was like what is that? Like when that happened she was like, that’s the end of this thing and it was just the still of it was so inspiring. I went back and wrote a whole piece of music. It’s not something that we used, but that was one thing about this film between the performances, the production design, the colors, the cinematographer cinematography, we would because when you’re writing you’re just pausing on the last note that you played, and every single frame could have been a painting hanging in the Museum of Modern Art like it was so inspiring.

Andrew Wyatt: We were spoiled because I remember the first moments that I saw the first dailies and you hear it’s a Barbie movie. It’s a franchise movie. You’re like, oh, I don’t know.
Mark Ronson: Here’s Barbie and you’re like, okay, but then you’re like, oh, there have been some great franchise movies and then you’re like, oh, it’s Greta Gerwig, that’s like really interesting when she’s doing the Barbie movie. There must be an angle to this and then you open it up and the energy was just flowing in this very graceful way. There was just something to it where you knew it was going to be a good movie. She spoiled us in the sense that this is our first movie, we got to work on something that no matter how many times we were stuck or how many times we re-approach to certain scene there was always enough inspiration in the film and the scene. We never felt like we were being paid. We always felt like it was a challenge and we just wanted to be good enough to belong here in this film, so those are very spoiling conditions to be working under.

Jillian Chilingerian: You have such a great cast too. Ryan Gosling with I’m Just Ken and the recent EP that was released. How did the performances guide additional layers and nuance? I also noticed we have different sound motifs between Barbie and Ken for their separate journeys that in the end pay off in the songs.
Mark Ronson: I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of watching Margot Robbie, break into tears like there are just so many times it happens in the film when she’s in the school when Sasha is horrible to her, when she’s telling Gloria like why don’t you go back to your world and at the very end when she’s becoming a human. There are so many layers to her performance, and then she could turn on a dime and do some like brilliant silly pratfalls like her performance was so inspiring. That was one of our favorite pieces to write the part where when she really just kicks off the shoes and then goes crazy. Andrew was like, we should go for the fences here. That’s the most intense over-the-top drum fill-in. They were so inspiring to watch and then Ryan, that’s the whole thing of this line that Greta wanted us to walk that speech when he goes you failed me like yes like he’s wearing four Rolexes, three G shocks, and looks ridiculous. It is never played for laughs, you feel like it might be over the top and overblown but you want to feel that real anguish that he’s feeling even if he’s like, expressing it in an adult-ish way, and until we start seeing the dailies of Ryan and what he was wearing and his performance and we’re like, oh, we have to dress this song up into pairs of sunglasses and a white mink because this has to match what he’s doing. So like that, we took all of the inspiration really from outside of the script and from the performances, which were so deep and powerful and wonderful.

Jillian Chilingerian: You can feel the actors, they’re so good at these characters. I will never see anyone except Margot Robbie crying as Barbie. It’s imprinted in my brain. How did their performances heighten your roles in creating what that sound is for each of their journeys?
Mark Ronson: Absolutely.
Andrew Wyatt: Yep, this one’s gonna be with us for a while. I mean, we’re just honored to be part of it. It was one of those things that just felt right and it felt like they’re archetypes now, they kind of were already because of the dolls. But this is going to be with us for a while.

Jillian Chilingerian: Finding the right combinations of instruments and sounds, the aesthetics of the film are very much from the 60s and the sound is from the 80s. How was it mixing those and figuring out the right melodies there are so many possibilities that you could have gone with.
Mark Ronson: That was just a lot of experimentation. We’re big fans of Elmer Bernstein and Williams and everyone, but specifically, I think, Graham Reynolds and what he did on the Bernie soundtrack was this wonderful marriage of the synthesizers of his time with the orchestra. So you get the sort of eeriness and what this synthesizer is, but you still get the wonderful depth and the resonance of the orchestra. So that was something that we were playing with. Brian Gallo scores like Blade Runner and people that we love in the 80s like that. It just has such a human and it sounds like you’re playing water like any of those sounds in the clouds or the puffy-like sort of 1000 notes. It’s almost like a harp and we even used it even a little bit on What Was I Made For. It has this ethereal unsightly way because it’s a synthesizer, but still emotive. So we were playing with anything that was going to elicit emotion. We went into every tool that we had to find the things that were stirring and making us excited.

Jillian Chilingerian: I want to see a Barbie concert with the soundtrack and everything because it was just the way everything was put together.
Mark Ronson: That’s our dream.
Andrew Wyatt: Bring it on. That’s right.

Jillian Chilingerian: The soundtrack is just so heavenly and just speaks so much to the emotion of the film but it’s fun, self-reflective, surreal and I can’t believe it was like both of your first time composing an entire film with this collaboration with Greta and it just everything feels so perfect with how it all came out.
Mark Ronson: Thank you so much.
Andrew Wyatt: Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

Barbie is currently streaming on Max.
You can read our review of Barbie here.