‘Barbie’ Music Producer Mark Ronson on Working With Dua Lipa, Lizzo, and Creating the Sound of the Year’s Biggest Film

Whether it’s a soundtrack, a score or a song placement, there are countless wrong ways to do music for film and so few ways to make it feel right. There’s very little leeway, which is why it can be so challenging for even the most successful hitmakers to make the transition to film music — especially with a major film event like “Barbie.”

With albums and songs by Amy Winehouse, Adele, Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney, Bruno Mars and many others under his belt, seven-time Grammy-winning producer Mark Ronson is one of the most successful pop songwriter-producers working today, yet his work on the soundtrack to Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster “Barbie” film — for which he co-wrote and co-produced five songs, cowrote the score with longtime collaborator Andrew Wyatt, and served as an executive music producer — was a new experience.

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“I can play a track for an artist and it’s a banger, right?,” he says. “With movies, it’s completely different. It might be an undeniably great piece of music, but if it’s not matching this unspoken thing that the director has always imagined when they see that image on the screen, it doesn’t work.”

That held true not only for the score but also for the 17-song soundtrack, which features bespoke songs by Lizzo, Dua Lipa, Sam Smith, Dominic Fike and costar Ryan Gosling, as well as Nicki Minaj & Ice Spice, Billie Eilish, Karol G, Charli XCX, Tame Impala, Haim and more (Ronson worked on the first five above-mentioned tracks). The film, which Ronson, 47, gradually became more and more involved with, temporarily sidelined work on his next solo album and a memoir of his early years as a DJ and producer, which he spoke with Variety about almost a year to the day before this interview, which took place last month, also at Ronson’s New York studio, amid stacks of amplifiers and dozens of gorgeous vintage guitars and keyboards. An edited version of the long conversation appears below.

How did your work on the soundtrack come about?

It started off with me only doing two songs, but they came out well, and I got on really well with Greta. I think she felt like I’d be a good kind of sparring partner to help realize her vision for the music, and working on the soundtrack sort of blossomed into scoring the film as well. So this thing that started off as a kind of humble text message from my friend George Drakoulias, the music supervisor, saying “Do you want to do a couple songs?” ended up being a whole a year and ballooned into being involved in the movie in such a big way.

How many songs did you actually produce?

Five — the Dua song, Lizzo, Dominic Fike, Ryan Gosling and [Sam Smith] — and I played some keys on the [Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice] “Barbie Girl” song and did a string arrangement on another song, and just helping here and there. But really, it wasn’t about me essentially putting my grubby mitts on everything because I was an executive producer — like, I don’t need to touch a Charli XCX song, she’s so cool and edgy that I don’t need to play a tiny keyboard line over it so I can get my credit, you know? Even though I produced a bunch of songs on the soundtrack, in other ways it was just more of an executive producer role: administrative, helping with clearances, things that are not as quote-unquote “creative.” But then once we started, I got to be the person that’s suddenly texting the artists seven times, going “Hey, Kevin [Parker of Tame Impala], we need this one edit, can you actually make it transpose at this moment?” I remember joking with Kevin, because we’re good friends, about having to hassle your friend to get them to finish the song. I had a daughter in December, in the middle of this process —

Congratulations!

Thank you. And I remember trying to alleviate annoying the crap out of him by saying, “When our daughters are watching this, 15 years from now or whatever, you can be like, “… And this is the scene where daddy’s friend Mark annoyed the shit out of him to get finished in time.” (Laughter) But really getting down and dirty, in the weeds, and being on these intense Zoom calls twice a week, and having to go to, like, [label CEOs] as the diplomat and asking for clearances and doing these kinds of things that are not necessarily my favorite thing to do — it’s much easier to just be the artist — but that was my job on this film. I don’t think I would have done it if the movie wasn’t so great.

Have you scored films before?

I’d done scenes here and there, but I’d never scored an entire film. I don’t think anybody knew how musically driven this film was going to be when we started.

So how did you end up scoring the biggest film of the year?

So, around March of last year, I read the script and I loved it so much, and maybe knowing already that Ryan Gosling was playing Ken … he’s a little doofy but he’s also so lovable, and he only exists in the shadow of Barbie, right? And she doesn’t even feel the way about him that he feels about her, so it’s like “That poor guy.” Sometimes it’s easier to get motivated for somebody with that kind of vulnerability. I am not usually a big lyric person, but just walking down the street one day this line came into my head, “I’m just Ken, anywhere else I’d be a 10.” Like, “I’m hot as fuck but I can’t get this person to notice me or understand me, what’s wrong?!”

I just had the chorus, but the whole thing came to me — chords, melody, lyric — and whenever that happens I see it as a blessing, because it’s not that often. I made a demo and sent it to Greta overnight, I kind of mumbled the “Oh, my blond fragility” line because I didn’t want her to write me back like, “We’re the screenwriters. We’ll make the jokes, thank you.” [Laughs] But she was like, “We love this song, and are you saying something about blond fragility? That’s great!” And then I think a day later she played it for Ryan and said, “I think Ryan wants to sing this in the film from Ken’s point of view.” Later, she said they had written it into this kind of penultimate battle scene, and they were like sending me storyboards — I’d never seen storyboards like that for film. It was really flattering and exciting because I’m a big fan of Greta and Noah’s work.

I brought in [songwriter-producer] Andrew Wyatt, who’s one of my favorite collaborators, to help finish it. And when they started to edit the film, they were like, “This two-minute song actually needs to be drawn out for a seven-minute sequence, so can you essentially score it, and make sections and breakdowns?” If we’d just looped sections of the song it would have been really boring and uninspiring. So we just started to play around and we essentially scored this seven-minute battle scene around the song. And then they gave us the opening credits, and we slowly ended up writing more and more music until a couple of months ago they were just like, “You’re scoring the film.”

Who selected the artists on the soundtrack?

We had a wish list, me and Greta, of people we thought would be great. It made sense that it was female-heavy, and then we just kind of went from the top. Greta is has so much good will because of her movies, and she’s just so cool. There wasn’t anybody that didn’t come back right from the jump, excited like to see a little bit of a film — and this was even before the first trailer.

We’d show artists little scenes that we thought would give them the best sense of the film — you know, either we’d sit on these zooms and we have a super-private, secure server or occasionally we’d get them in a screening room and give them a really good idea of where we wanted their song to be or whose voice they’d be speaking from and the emotion of the story they’re telling. These artists are all like super clever and great lyricists, so we really were spoiled — like, a week or two later, “Hey, what do you guys think of this?” And it would just be incredible.

It’s sampled on the Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice song, but why isn’t Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” on the soundtrack?

I don’t know, you’d have to ask Greta. But everything about this film is trying to be a reinvention or an evolution of what we think Barbie is, so maybe Nicki and Ice Spice flipping the “Barbie Girl” was a way of doing that. And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t in the back of my head, “How do we possibly have a Barbie soundtrack without Nicki Minaj on it?” Because that is the person who’s been keeping the term Barbie relevant for the last 15 years [with her “Barbz” fans]. So the fact that we managed to have this reinvention of “Barbie Girl” with Nicki and Ice, it almost feels like too good to be true.

Did you and Andrew draw on the work of any film composers for this?

Our references were everyone from John Williams, Nino Rota, Carter Burwell, all the greats. I also like Elmer Bernstein’s “Ghostbusters” score, and and “Working Girl” and “Heaven Can Wait” and other things from the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Some things weren’t necessarily references, like Maurice Jarre and Thomas Newman, that balance synthesizers and orchestra in this really lovely way. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Yamaha CS-80 [1970s-era synthesizer] but we actually got one into this room — it was only moved out just a few days ago, it’s such a titan it took up like the entire room. All those old synthesizers have kind of become the domain of “Stranger Things” type music — you know, eerie and windy, but there’s also a rich, emotive, very wide thing that it can do. Greta also loves orchestral music and classic scores, so it was about balancing the two sounds.

We had to learn everything on the job and sometimes we learned by falling on our faces. But Greta sort of allowed us to fuck up. She had a lot of faith in us, for such a huge movie with so much expectation on it, [to commission] first-time composers. Occasionally, we’d come out of here with a piece of music, like, “This is awesome, she’s gonna love it,” and we’d be watching it together and I’d be looking over — “It’s not working, is it?” And it wasn’t because it’s not a good piece of music, but it’s just not the the best thing to complement this vision she has. So there were some nice humbling things along the way.

The movie is kind of kitsch personified — it’s not like the vibe of your “Late Night Feelings” album and some of the more serious things you’ve done. Was that a challenging transition to make?

No, and I think you’ll see why if you see the film. It starts kitsch, because it’s obviously setting up this world, and it’s very like “Barbie’s perfect day,” but so much of the movie is beautiful and deep and offers so many existential questions about life. And that’s where I saw some parallels to like things like “The Truman Show.” It’s poignant but it’s still light. And scoring a film, you watch certain scenes ad nauseam — I’ve seen Margot Robbie break up into tears like a million times, and every time she gets me, Ryan too. There’s something about these performances, this balance of comic and pathos. It’s just wonderful the whole way along.

Where are you at with the memoir and solo album we spoke about last year? Are they both about your days coming up in the New York club scene of the ‘90s?

I want them to be, even if they don’t come out at the same time. They’re definitely cousins. The album will certainly have the spirit of some of that ‘90s music, when Jay-Z and Puff [Sean “Diddy” Combs] were emerging as the sort of mayors of New York. It was the last era before camera phones, the smoking ban, and VIP fatcats that like started to move in and eat up the dancefloor space. I don’t feel like anyone’s written the definitive DJ book, in the way that Anthony Bourdain wrote the definitive chef’s book — what the humdrum, day-to-day was like, with the shitty club owners and the hole-in-the-wall clubs with bad equipment. That’s a world I know. I don’t think DJing is as universal or have the same level of interest as cooking, and I’m also not saying I can [write] like Anthony Bourdain, but I do like the fact that he said he was just writing for chefs and anyone else who found it, great. I just started getting back to it, I’ve got about four chapters done and I’ve got at least 10 to go.

The reason that I started the book was because I was thinking about my next record — it would be my sixth or seventh solo record, which for somebody who doesn’t even sing or is a conventional artist is already kind of [unusual], so you’re always trying to think of ideas or concepts to inspire you and give you a little bit of a North Star. And the music that I’ve working on in the studio feels the most related to a ‘90s kind of thing, when I was coming up in the clubs on the R&B and hip hop of that era.

Are you hearing certain singers for those new songs?

Not yet. It’s still so early. By the time I’m recording, nine months or whatever from now, there could be some brilliant new singer we haven’t heard of yet. Who knows?

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