Greta Gerwig is trying not to feel the pressure to live up to Barbie.

The Lady Bird filmmaker became the first solo female director to make $1 billion (£805 million) at the worldwide box office this year thanks to the phenomenal success of Barbie, which is currently the highest-grossing movie of 2023.

Following her milestone year, Gerwig admitted to Vanity Fair that she is trying not to “internalize the pressure to live up to something” with her next projects.

“But I don’t want to get too precious about making the ‘right’ decision,” she added. “Two years ago, nobody thought Barbie was the right decision. I want to give myself enough time to get lost so that I’m not so demanding of output to let it be uncomfortable.”

The Little Women filmmaker noted that the best way to prevent herself from feeling overwhelmed by the pressure is to move onto the next project.

“I don’t want to not take the extraordinariness (of Barbie’s success) in. And I do, I feel it, it’s incredible. But the thing that makes me not feel overwhelmed is to keep doing the work. Now, get back to work. Keep going,” she stated.

She also acknowledged that she feels “terror” before she makes anything new, but Barbie has simply magnified it.

“At some point, the terror of never making anything becomes much bigger than the terror of making something bad,” she explained. “(The feeling is) not going away, there’s not some door you’re going to step through and then just have, like, certainty.”

Gerwig is currently working on two film adaptations of C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia book series, which she will write and direct for Netflix.

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