Music is key to ‘Barbie’ writer-director Greta Gerwig’s creative process. Back in 2017, around the release of her directorial debut Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig made an appearance on KCRW’s Guest DJ Project to share five songs that expressed “vivid emotions” and inspired her over the years.
Now, on The Treat, the director of the blockbuster hit of the summer of 2023 describes hearing David Bowie's 1972 album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars for the first time.
Gerwig says Bowie’s fifth studio album about an androgynous rock star sent to earth made her feel like it was made just for her and “jolted” her alive when she first heard it at 18.
This segment has been edited for length and clarity.
I don't know why [The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars] missed me or I didn't know about it, but I think I didn't hear this album until I was 18. And I couldn't believe it.
When I heard this album, I felt like it was made just for me. I felt like I was an alien. I felt like I was a man from Mars.
I felt like there was something about it that was so emotional, but it was so grandiose, and it felt like it was speaking directly to me. [There’s] something about David Bowie's voice and confidence and humor in it that It was just transcendent.
I wrote all the lyrics over everything I owned. I wrote “Keep your electric eye on me, babe” everywhere. I just had this sense of it speaking right to me and it was the first time I really wanted to merge with an artist and merge with a piece of art, and David Bowie in that album was that for me.
When I was in college, I had a poster of Bowie up in my room. There was a poster of him pre all the characters he would become. It was more of an early, when he was sort of doing more the “London Bye, Ta-ta,” that kind of stuff… There was no face makeup; there was no red hair. He just looks clean cut and emerging out of the pop scene of the ‘60s. And I think I liked looking at it because it was like his self-invention was part of his deep appeal for me, that he made himself up.
For a certain kind of kid, I think he gave you that feeling of like, “That's who I am. I either am from that planet or I want to be, but I understand what he's doing.” That's how I felt.
I have listened to everything he ever made, but that album just jolted me alive. I'm not a musician, so I had no hope of making an album like that. I just felt like I wanted to catch a ride on it, somehow.
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