Greta Gerwig cut a "fart opera" from Barbie

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is so outrageous, so bold, so gonzo, that people are wondering how she managed to get away with it in a big corporate blockbuster. According to Gerwig, not much changed from the script she originally wrote with Baumbach to the film that thousands of theatergoers saw opening weekend. But there is one gag she did end up sacrificing, which she calls a “fart opera.”

“We’ve always tried to get in a proper fart joke and we’ve never done it,” Gerwig told IndieWire. “We had like a fart opera in the middle [of ‘Barbie’]. I thought it was really funny. And that was not the consensus.” Nick Houy, Gerwig’s longtime editor, felt the gag “was in the wrong place, too,” he told the outlet. “We need to work it into a more significant narrative moment next time.”

Overall, however, Gerwig got to include everything she wanted to in their audacious script. (Even Houy, after reading it, questioned, “Are they going to let you do it?”) Part of that is due to star and producer Margot Robbie, who advocated for Gerwig’s vision, as the filmmaker explained to The New York Times.

Beyond that, “Part of me thinks that because it was all so idiosyncratic and so wild, it was almost like no one really knew where to start taking it apart,” Gerwig mused to the NYT. “Like, where are you going to start hacking away at how strange it was? Maybe because there was this sense of sheer joy behind it, it was this hard thing to say, ‘Oh no, we don’t want that thing that’s sheer joy.’ People wanted it to exist, in all its weirdness.”

Mattel execs got infamously skittish, during a trip to the London set, about one character’s rant against Barbies, but they eventually let it slide. “It wasn’t like I ever got the full seal of approval from [Mattel], like, ‘We love it!’ I got a tentative, ‘Well, OK. I see that you are going to do this, so go ahead and we’ll see how it goes.’ But that’s all you need, and I had faith once it was in there and they saw it that they would embrace it, not fight it,” Gerwig explained. “Maybe at the end of the day, my will to have it in was stronger than any other will to take it out.”