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Unless you’ve been living under a Dreamhouse, you know how this works: In Barbie Land, all Barbies are named Barbie and all Kens are named Ken. But in real life? Everyone is Enya. “Everybody gets ‘Sail Away,’” says Greta Gerwig of her ringtone. “Everybody.” In addition to a successful acting and screenwriting career (she starred in Greenberg, Frances Ha, and Mistress America), Gerwig was personally nominated for three Oscars between Lady Bird and Little Women. Then, this year, her 40th, came Barbie, the highest-grossing film ever helmed by a woman, a commercial anomaly even for its stars. Gerwig also wrote Barbie with her life partner, the writer and director Noah Baumbach. That she maintains a carefully curated existence seems at once a Hollywood rarity and the tentpole of her success. (She uses words like rigor and essential a lot and eschews social media, that “terrifying construction of a self through taste.”) In short: She likes what she likes, be it Truffaut or Titanic, which she saw eight times as a Sacramento teen and “wept beyond anything I thought I was capable of.” Perhaps this explains why, this past summer, a certain generation of women watched Margot Robbie zipping along in her pink Corvette, a challah of blond hair over her shoulder, singing along to the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine,” and thought: Am I really watching this? Or rather, Am I getting to watch this?

The answer is more than $1.4 billion worth of yes. This is not just children of the ’90s speaking. Gerwig, along with Taylor Swift, has had the most quantifiably successful year of any artist on the planet, creating a paradigm shift that brought people back to theaters just as Swift brought them back to stadiums.

Getting her to acknowledge any of this, however, is like asking Ken to put his shirt on.

Gerwig says she has not read a word of the Barbie reviews. “I’ll probably sit down with a binder sometime in February,” she told me, “But right now it’s too fresh.” This is the first extended profile she’s agreed to since the Barbie bonanza, so speaking with her really is a little like speaking with someone who’s been living under a Dreamhouse—except she’s the one who built the house. She credits everyone but herself for Barbie, which mostly reads as deference to other people’s talent and aesthetics but can run at odds with the movie’s impact, globally as well as personally. She concedes that “this year is the most that I’ve ever been recognized in my neighborhood,” but beyond the radius of NYU? “I don’t know.” The money is also “hard to wrap my head around.” She has an osmotic sense of the genuflection and the backlash—is Barbie second-wave feminist? Malibu-wave feminist?—but “there was such a cacophony so it was more like, ‘Wow, what a breadth of reactions!’” Gerwig refers to her leading actors, namely Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie, as “pathologically unfrilly.”

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