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Will there be a Ken movie? | 60 Minutes
This week, 60 Minutes profiled director, actor and screenwriter Greta Gerwig.
Her latest film, the out-of-the-box blockbuster “Barbie,” was the highest grossing movie of last year, bringing in more than a billion dollars worldwide.
When she was initially tapped to write and direct it, Gerwig enlisted the help of her partner in work and life, filmmaker Noah Baumbach. Baumbach, who has written and directed critically acclaimed independent dramas like “The Squid and the Whale” and “Marriage Story,” was a bit perplexed by the idea of a Barbie film.
“I couldn’t even fathom it,” he said. “And Greta wrote these pages…and I thought, ‘I can write this Barbie movie. I totally understand what this is.'”
In an interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, Baumbach and Gerwig spoke about their work on “Barbie,” their approach to screenwriting, and why their partnership works. And Alfonsi tried to learn what she could about a “Barbie” sequel.
Gerwig explained that the film begins “very mechanically…like a clock” with Barbie and friends enjoying a picture-perfect day in Barbie Land. And then suddenly, there’s an existential crisis: Barbie asks, “Do you guys ever think about dying?”
That moment in the movie is the end result of a writing process that began with Gerwig penning a few early pages for the script and showing them to Baumbach. In those early pages, Barbie meets an old woman in her backyard and is confronted by the idea of her own mortality.
“Noah immediately understood what I was doing and was like, ‘You know, this is exciting and there’s a movie in here,'” Gerwig explained.
The writing duo also revealed how their writing process informs their approach to directing. Both Gerwig and Baumbach said they prefer to stick to exactly what was written in the script with no substitutions on set when the movie is filmed.
Gerwig said that in the films “Lady Bird” and “Little Women,” everything was scripted, down to each “you know” and “um.” She says this level of detail is important to retain the rhythm of a conversation that’s been written and read aloud hundreds of times before the first frame is shot.
“Once we have something that feels more like a script, then we start reading the whole thing out loud,” she explained. “We vetted the language ourselves, so we can hear if there’s a joke that’s repeated or a rhythm that’s off.”
Baumbach and Gerwig said that when writing the “Barbie” script, they always had Ryan Gosling in mind to play Ken, even writing his full name next to Ken’s lines in the first draft.
When writing for the role of Ken, Baumbach and Gerwig came up with a wealth of ideas they couldn’t fit into their final draft. In an earlier version of the script, they further explored the “Ken effect” in the real world and wrote a scene for the movie in which Ryan Gosling plays himself.
“We had way too much material for Ken. We would write, and write, and write,” Gerwig explained. Baumbach interrupted and told Gerwig not to “give it away.”
Alfonsi asked, “Would there ever be a Ken Movie?” Gerwig laughed and said she couldn’t comment on that, but she didn’t rule it out completely.
“I mean, the truth is, you know — I guess we’ll see,” she said with a smile.
The video above was originally published on December 3, 2023. It was produced and edited by Will Croxton.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill Saturday that would have required new cars to beep at drivers if they exceed the speed limit in an effort to reduce traffic deaths.
California would have become the first to require such systems for all new cars, trucks and buses sold in the state starting in 2030. The bill would have mandated that vehicles beep at drivers when they exceed the speed limit by at least 10 mph.
The European Union has passed similar legislation to encourage drivers to slow down. California’s proposal would have provided exceptions for emergency vehicles, motorcycles and motorized scooters.
In explaining his veto, Newsom said federal law already dictates vehicle safety standards and adding California-specific requirements would create a patchwork of regulations.
The National Highway Traffic Safety “is also actively evaluating intelligent speed assistance systems, and imposing state-level mandates at this time risks disrupting these ongoing federal assessments,” the Democratic governor said.
Opponents, including automotive groups and the state Chamber of Commerce, said such regulations should be decided by the federal government, which earlier this year established new requirements for automatic emergency braking to curb traffic deaths. Republican lawmakers also said the proposal could make cars more expensive and distract drivers.
The legislation would have likely impacted all new car sales in the U.S., since the California market is so large that car manufacturers would likely just make all of their vehicles comply.
California often throws that weight around to influence national and even international policy. The state has set its own emission standards for cars for decades, rules that more than a dozen other states have also adopted. And when California announced it would eventually ban the sale of new gas-powered cars, major automakers soon followed with their own announcement to phase out fossil-fuel vehicles.
Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, who sponsored the bill, called the veto disappointing and a setback for street safety.
“California should have led on this crisis as Wisconsin did in passing the first seatbelt mandate in 1961,” Wiener said in a statement. “Instead, this veto resigns Californians to a completely unnecessary risk of fatality.”
The speeding alert technology, known as intelligent speed assistance, uses GPS to compare a vehicle’s pace with a dataset of posted limits. If the car is at least 10 mph over, the system emits a single, brief, visual and audio alert.
The proposal would have required the state to maintain a list of posted speed limits, and it’s likely that those would not include local roads or recent changes in speed limits, resulting in conflicts.
The technology has been used in the U.S. and Europe for years. Starting in July, the European Union will require all new cars to have the technology, although drivers would be able to turn it off. At least 18 manufacturers including Ford, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Nissan, have already offered some form of speed limiters on some models sold in America, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 10% of all car crashes reported to police in 2021 were related to speeding. This was especially a problem in California, where 35% of traffic fatalities were speeding-related — the second highest in the country, according to a legislative analysis of the proposal.
Last year the NTSB recommended federal regulators require all new cars to alert drivers when they speed. Their recommendation came after a crash in January 2022, when a man with a history of speeding violations ran a red light at more than 100 mph and struck a minivan, killing himself and eight other people.
