By Iain Blair

Helmed by Greta Gerwig, co-written by Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, Barbie is a celebration of girl power that effortlessly manages to combine romance, sharp satire, stylish musical numbers, wacky car chases and warm-hearted comedy – all tied up with a big pink bow.

This surprise blockbuster also showcases skillful editing by Nick Houy, ACE, who seamlessly blends all the disparate elements into a coherent whole. I spoke with Houy, who has cut all of Gerwig’s projects, starting with Lady Bird and including Little Women, about the challenges and workflow.

What were the main challenges of editing Barbie?
(Laughs) Talk about shifts in tone. I can’t think of any other film, especially with this level of success, that comes close. First off, it’s this huge comedy, and they aren’t usually the biggest film of the year. Then we’re constantly shifting gears and showing you what the film’s really about, and constantly pulling the rug out from under the big comedy and trying to tell the story of what it is to become human – and suddenly it’s got much bigger philosophical ideas. So finding the right tones and balancing them all was the biggest challenge.

This is not your typical Gerwig project, and because of all the VFX, this had to be very carefully planned out. How did you two collaborate early on?
First, when I read the original script she’d co-written with Noah, I knew it was going to be something special and have a lot of tonal changes. Then, obviously, I knew we’d have to deal with all the VFX, which we hadn’t worked with in the past.

Luckily, the studio, VFX supervisor Glen Pratt, VFX producer Nick King and the teams were so good about letting us be super-creative in the cutting room. It was about finding the tone of the whole movie, even if it meant losing a scene one day and putting it back the next and then trying it a different way.

Most VFX teams would have been pulling their hair out because we were making serious changes in every reel, every day as we tried tons of different things — just as you would if you were writing a draft of a script. But they were game, as was Warners, and they all supported us through that whole process of finding the movie. It took a while, but it was such a fun process.

It must have been a very steep learning curve dealing with tons of VFX?
Yes, but the great thing was that they held our hands the whole way through. I’ve never seen a VFX team that was so cool, and it was fun. We’d discuss stuff like, should the merman’s tail come out of the water this way or that? Should this house be an old A-frame-style Barbie house or a Frank Lloyd Wright-style house? We worked really hard, but it felt like play all the time — so enjoyable.

In the end, I spent about 14 months, including all the prep and the shoot, and we had a lot of previz as well. In fact, not long ago we finished cutting some extras, including finding some old, deleted scenes, which we put together in a 6-minute montage to go at the end of the IMAX release. So if people go to the IMAX release they’ll see the latest stuff we’ve done. I hope to keep working on as much Barbie stuff as possible, because it’s been such a fun ride… but I think that’s the last of it.

Given all the VFX work, were you on-set?
I try not to go on-set at all. I feel that an editor should be like the audience, seeing it fresh and being totally objective, without having anything you’ve seen on-set influencing you. That’s important, but I’m always in constant communication with Greta, talking and texting while she’s shooting. I have to know what she’s thinking at all times and give her information that I’m finding. I was in New York while they were shooting in London and LA, so it was a crazy schedule. I’d be up at 5am texting, and it was a really long shoot.

Did all the previz, postviz and techviz impact your work at all?
It didn’t. It just brought extra depth to it. Whenever we had a beautiful shot of Barbie waving and looking over Barbie Land, we worked on that shot for the whole time we were in post, adding little details and opening up your eyeline to the horizon. If you consider doing that for 100 key shots, and then everything else is being filled in based on the geography that you set in these key shots — and you do all that properly — then you really feel that you’re in this world.

That’s a rare feeling, I think. You recognize it, but it’s so detailed that you just want to get lost in it. It’s nostalgic for a lot of people and so beautiful, and the set design is just gorgeous. It also has this great Wizard of Oz look with all the 2D set paintings. So it all feels really tactile and made by real people, which is really cool.

What was the most difficult scene to cut and why?
Everything was a challenge. When you have a Tati-esque, Marx Brothers-style, crazy chase scene immediately followed by a really long, quiet scene full of emotional dialogue — where the main characters meet their creator — and then you immediately go into another big set piece with a wild car chase, that’s a unique challenge as an editor. We also have these long dance sequences. I don’t know anyone else who’s had to deal with that. You have to use all your learned skills as an editor, as it’s a very tricky line to walk.

I assume you must have used a lot of temp sound?
Oh yeah! I always use a lot of temp music, trying to get the tone of the temp score and all of the temp sound that tells the story. That way, when we’re doing temp screenings, I don’t get taken aback because the sound or music isn’t right. I think that’s a crutch, and you have to make it the very best it can be so that you know you’re testing what the film actually is.

There were around 1,600 VFX shots, which is a lot. Did you use any temp VFX shots?
Absolutely, and our team was really good at temping in, so never once was there a single bluescreen shot in any of the temp screenings we did. It was an amazing accomplishment.

Tell us about the workflow and the editing gear you used.
To me, it doesn’t really matter what software we use since it’s all about telling the story, but we used Avid Version 2021.12. One of the most interesting tech details was that we edited in UHD, so it was very high-quality. When we’d do test screenings, it looked beautiful, even on huge screens straight out of the Avid. That was so cool.

We rented all the equipment and stored all the footage with Company 3, where we did all the editing and the DI. I think we were the first to do all this in UHD and just cut our offline in high resolution. Our primary camera was the ARRI Alexa 65 in ARRIRAW and with a resolution of 6560×3100. The color space was ARRI Log C/Wide Gamut.

In terms of project information, it was 3840×2160, 16×9 aspect ratio using 2×1 mask, 24fps, YCbCr DCI-P3 color space. DNxHR LB MXF media was in P3 D65 color space. As far as Nexis storage space, we had a ton available to us since we were set up on our own Nexis outside of the rest of Company 3. We used around 25TB to 30TB. Lastly, we were all using Mac Pros, the newer “Cheese Grater” generation.

Finally, how would you sum up the whole experience?
We all knew we had something special, and everyone was operating at the top of their game. It was such a fun, satisfying experience, but it’s still a shock to see how big it’s become and how it resonates with people.

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Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.