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Madonna is getting comfortable on a pillow while talking to me.
I can imagine this (and, of course, do) because this is what she has told me she is doing. The star is calling from a New York City hotel room where she's relaxing a bit after spending the day promoting her new film, "W.E.," which she co-wrote and directed.
The film, which opens today, signals a blitz of all things Madonna.
Today also sees the release of the video "Give Me All Your Luvin'," the lead single off her new album "MDNA," due March 26; and Sunday she will perform in front of more than 100 million TV viewers as the Super Bowl halftime entertainment.
"The Super Bowl is like throwing yourself into a juggernaut of insanity because you have 12 minutes to put on the greatest show on Earth," says the 53-year-old. "And you've got to fit it all into the football frenzy. So far it's been a daunting task, and I hope I can live up to everybody's expectations."
The expectations she most likely needs to be concerned about, though, are her own.
An entertainment icon, her nearly 30 years in the spotlight seems to have been governed entirely by her own rules. If Madonna hadn't invented herself, America would have had to. Her influence on the culture is so pronounced that there is hardly a woman under 50 who hasn't dressed like her at one time or another. She has - and still is - redefining the female image.
If Marilyn Monroe was trapped inside her sexpot persona, Madonna has taken that and turned it inside out and given it back to the world - material girl, spiritualist, savvy entrepreneur, sexual fetishist, fill in the blank and, obviously, mother. (She has four children, but who else would be brazen enough to be known by the name of a revered religious figure?)
As a testament to her sway, in March, "Madonna and Me: Women Writers on the Queen of Pop," an anthology of essays by some 40 women writers, edited by Laura Barcella, will be published.
A sometimes controversial figure, Madonna chose controversial figures for the focus of "W.E.," which opened in December for a brief awards-qualification run. It tells the story of the romance between Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), a divorced American, and Britain's King Edward VIII (James D'Arcy), who famously or infamously abdicated the throne for her in 1936. It's partly told through the eyes of an unhappily married Manhattan woman named Wally (Abbie Cornish) in the 1990s - who is fascinated by the couple and is attracted to a security guard, a handsome Russian emigre (Oscar Isaac).
Madonna says her own fascination with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor began when she was in high school but became more pronounced when she moved to England after marrying British director Guy Ritchie. (They have since divorced, and she has no trace of the English accent she sported for a while.)
"I decided to understand this new country I was living in," she says. "I thought one of the things I was fascinated by was the class system and reading about the aristocracy and the royal family," and that led to a lot of reading.
She says she found it "unfathomable" that Edward would walk away from the throne.
"I was just trying to understand the nature of the decision and the nature of their relationship," she says. The letters the two wrote, she says, gave her the most insight into the couple.
"I was sure one minute that it was
Madonna wrote the script for "W.E." with Alek Keshishian, the director of her 1991 tour documentary, "Truth or Dare," which is coming out on a new Blu-ray edition in April. (Truth or Dare also happens to be the name of some of her product lines.)
"W.E." was shot in 2010 on a 54-day schedule that included locales of London, New York, Paris, the English countryside and the South of France.
"She's very much a choreographer," says Cornish about Madonna, who over the years was intimately involved in the making of her music videos and stage shows. "All of what she learned in her world definitely goes into her process of filmmaking."
Madonna, who has no onscreen role in the film, says it was "liberating and wonderful being behind the camera, using things that I know help me and inform my work.
"I love being with my crew and being able to wear my tracksuit every day," she says. "I didn't have to worry about how I looked - my hair, my makeup and everything."
Music, as you would expect, plays a large role in the film. The score was written by Golden Globe-nominated composer Abel Korzeniowski, and there are a number of eclectic songs and informal dance numbers peppered throughout.
Madonna won the Golden Globe for best original song last month for "Masterpiece," which is sung over the closing credits.
The filmmaker would also play music on the set to create moods - other scores by Korzeniowski or Michael Galasso, who had worked on a number of films by Wong Kar-Wai, one of Madonna's favorite directors; or something by Dvorak.
"I think I drove my soundman crazy," she says.
Madonna has been enamored with movies all her life, and as she got older and moved from her native Michigan to New York City to become a dancer at 19, she began to learn about foreign films.
So with "W.E." - her second directorial feature after the little-seen, low-budget "Filth and Wisdom" in 2008 - she was able to go back to her film library and be reminded about what she loved.
"So I learned from everything really, and then you have to throw everything out and say there are no rules. Sometimes people would get a little ticked off with me because I wouldn't cover (scenes) in the conventional way," she says. "And you know, sometimes I would just say, `Why?' (French director Jean Luc) Godard wouldn't do that. He would just say continuity is for pussies. You know what I mean? I know there's a lot of things to learn from the great masters, but at the end of the day it's got to be your own voice and point of view."
After spending time in a small, dark editing room working on "W.E.," Madonna traded it in for a slightly larger room with a sound console to work on "MDNA" (the title has a number of references, including to her name).
"Everybody makes music on a computer, so you don't even need a recording studio anymore except for some live instruments," she notes.
Her collaborators on the project were producers William Orbit and Martin Solveig. Rappers M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj appear on "Give Me All Your Luvin'," and Korzeniowski conducted the orchestra on some of the songs.
One of the tracks, "Beautiful Killer," is a tribute to French film star Alain Delon, an obsession she shares with Solveig, "if you must know," she says confidingly.
When I suggest that "W.E." is something of a fantasia rather than a straight biopic, the filmmaker isn't sure how to take it.
"It's a big mistake for any of us to take history literally. I'm a big fan of doing as much research as possible, and I wanted to be as authentic and as close to the truth as possible, but I wanted to be very clear that truth is subjective," Madonna says.
"Our big mistake in life is to judge people on a surface level or to take things literally."
While researching the movie, she found herself "irritated" that many people jumped to conclusions about the duke and duchess without knowing much about them. Two recent film portrayals of the couple - last year's Oscar winner "The King's Speech" and the British miniseries "Any Human Heart" - have been quite unflattering, to say the least.
"This isn't something that's limited to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor," Madonna says. "This is something that we all are guilty of every day, about all sorts of people in all sorts of events in history. ... I hate to ramble but it's obviously one of my pet peeves. I didn't set out to portray either of them as saints or righteous people, but I certainly set out to portray them as human beings and to deal with them in a compassionate nature, which is how we all should be dealt with."
Studying the couple's complicated relationship, Madonna feels, has helped her to understand the nature of love.
"There is no such thing as perfect love, and true deep meaningful love does require an enormous amount of compromise and sacrifice."
Rob Lowman
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