Madonna is on the new issue of Vanity Fair. In the interview she talks about everything, from Guy Richie to Britney Spears to working with Justin Timberlake, to her new films and music, and to worldly and global issues.
Here is a little bit of the interview:
On making an album ["Hard Candy"] with Justin Timberlake, who co-wrote five of the songs and sings on four, Pharrell Williams, and the producer Timbaland:
“I didn’t have any idea what kind of music I wanted to make,” Madonna told me. “I just knew I wanted to collaborate with Pharrell and Justin. I needed to be inspired and thought, ‘Well, who’s making records I like? So I went, I like that guy and I like that guy.’ It’s not like we hit it off right away. Writing is very intimate. You have to be vulnerable and it’s hard to do that with strangers. I had ups and downs before everybody got comfortable, but I grew very fond of Pharrell and Justin.”
Madonna on her take of what is happening to Britney Spears:
“It’s very painful. Which leads us back to our question: When you think about the way people treat each other in Africa, about witchcraft and people inflicting cruelty and pain on each other, then come back here and, you know, people taking pictures of people when they’re in their homes, being taken to hospitals, or suffering, and selling them, getting energy from them, that’s a terrible infliction of cruelty. So who’s worse off? You know what I mean?”
As a sidenote: Did you know Madonna does Pilates and dance aerobics to Britney’s latest album? She says that she loves it!
Madonna on, Filth and Wisdom, which she co-wrote, produced, and directed:
“I’ve been inspired by films since I started dancing, and I’m married to a filmmaker, and I think it was one of my secret desires, but I was afraid to just say, ‘I want to be a director’… But then one day I said, O.K., stop dreaming and do it. But I didn’t want to do it the Hollywood way and talk through agents. I decided it all had to be generated by me, so I wrote it.”
She then said, “It was my film school.”
“I feel this film was seriously influenced by Godard,” Madonna said. “He’s the one filmmaker I was always inspired by, but I have a lot of other filmmakers I was inspired by, all dead Europeans. I went to the University of Michigan for one year and fortunately they had a foreign-film cinema, and I discovered it, and I thought I died and went to heaven. I discovered Fellini and Visconti and Pasolini and De Sica and Buñuel.”
Madonna on her Kabbalah beliefs:
“Ultimately everything’s good…Even bad is good, because bad is there to help you resist it. You need to have that resistance to be good, and, let’s face it, the worst things that happen are always the best things that happen. If you look back at your life and say, ‘Well, what did you learn? What happened that changed your life, that made you strong, that made you grow’, it’s always things you perceived as bad.”
“So is there bad?”
