Although he cowrote Barbie with his partner Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach wasn’t always confident that the film was going to make over a billion at the box office. At a recent sold-out Barbie screening, Baumbach revealed that he initially thought a Barbie movie was “a terrible idea” that Gerwig roped him into: “You have to get us out of this.”

Baumbach has been mum regarding his thoughts on Barbie, sitting out the majority of Barbie’s press cycle in accordance with the WGA strike. Now that the writers strike is over, Baumbach opened up about his experience cowriting the year’s biggest film, which has currently grossed $1.4 billion at the global box office. 

“The reason you make anything is because you’re saying to this imaginary audience, ‘Maybe you feel this way too?’” Baumbach said this weekend, in conversation with Judd Apatow. “So, when the whole world seems to feel that way, then that’s very gratifying and very moving. Because sometimes people are like, ‘No we don’t recognize that feeling.’” Although Barbie has certainly connected with audiences, at first, Baumbach was far from convinced it was going to be a success. After years of development hell,  Barbie star Margot Robbie approached Gerwig to write and direct the film via Robbie’s production company, LuckyChap Entertainment. Gerwig agreed, but only if Baumbach could come on as a cowriter. 

“I thought it was a terrible idea and Greta signed me up for it,” he said. “I was just like, ‘I don’t see how this is going to be good at all.’ I kind of blocked it for a while and every time she’d bring it up, I’d be like, ‘You’ve gotta get us out of this.’ And then the pandemic happened…” 

Gerwig, who was busy attending a separate Barbie screening, arrived at Baumbach and Apatow’s Q and A just in time to elucidate why Baumbach thought Barbie was such a bad idea.“‘There’s no character and there’s no story, so why do you want to do this? There’s no entry point,’” she said, imitating him. “And he’d do, like, side calls to try to get us out of it.”

Baumbach began to warm up to the idea during the pandemic, after reading a few pages that Gerwig had written for the movie. “It was Barbie waking up in her Dreamhouse and coming out to her backyard and meeting somebody who was sick and dying,” he said. “I read these pages and I thought, ‘I understand now what this is.’… The movie is about embracing your mortality and about the mess of it all, so it was exciting.”

Once he was onboard, Baumbach said writing the script with Gerwig was “the most fun I think either of us have ever had…. And then at a certain point, I was like, ‘I think this is the best thing we’ve ever written,’” he continued. “I know enough always just to follow what Greta says, so even in my bellyaching and revolting, I kind of knew, ‘Well if she really believes it, then there’s something there.’”

Baumbach revealed that he and Gerwig tend to write separately and then trade their work. “Then we listen to hear if the other person’s laughing,” quipped Gerwig. 

For her part, Gerwig explained why she was firm in her belief that they could make a successful Barbie film. “It wasn’t that I had a take of an idea. It just seemed strange enough,” she said. “Everybody knows what Barbie is. It’s been around since 1959. Everybody has an opinion about it; it runs the gamut from ‘I hate her. I love her. She’s an inspiration. She’s terrible.’ I felt like there was enough there. In a way, it was like saying, ‘If you leave us alone, we’ll figure it out.’” Gerwig then revealed that she tends to keep her ideas close to her chest when working on new projects. “I find whenever I’ve shared ideas too early, they become bad, then the movie’s not going to be any good,” she said. “I don’t like to talk about things too early or pitch things or show treatments too early because it feels like it’s gonna somehow wreck what the movie is.”