Ordinarily, to deal with monochromatic lighting headaches like the ones seen in “Barbie,” a cinematographer will create pointed black spaces in the background to reduce reflection, but also to aesthetically draw the eye to a more colorful figure in the foreground. As Prieto explains, such a practice is called “negative fill.” Gerwig, however, noted that Barbieland — true to its toy shelf counterpart — was to feature no blacks, blues, or other darker colors. As such, Prieto had to get creative. He said: 

“One of the challenges was that there were so many props and set design that was a very saturated Pink, and other colors too, but mostly pink. So anytime I turned on the backlight, the bounce on the faces was pink, so all the actors looked magenta. I didn’t want to create hard contrast or anything, so I wouldn’t be able to bring in black — they call it negative fill — so instead of negative fill, I created a neutral fill.”

What is a neutral fill? Grey. Nice, plain, comforting grey. Light reflected off a grey surface will produce a neutral, non-magenta tone. Just off-camera, then, everything was covered with grey cloth. Prieto noted:

“So what that is, is that we had tons of neutral gray material, and we’d drape everything that was not on camera with gray. That way it was bouncing some light, but it wasn’t tinted with color.” 

Prieto also took a lot of lighting and camera cues from one of the most notably colorful and fantastical French classics, well-known to cinematographers and cinephiles the world over. “Barbie” took its visual style from Jacques Demy’s 1964 classic “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.”