| Background Info:
Madonna chose Chris Cunningham
as the director for 'Frozen' after she had seen the
outstanding video he did for Aphex Twin ('Come to Daddy').
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He later became even more
famous for his award-winning Bjork-Video for All
Is Full Of Love.
The video was filmed on January 7 & 8, 1998 in the
Californian Mojave Desert. Even though it's a desert
it wasn't hot at all as there are zero-tempratures during
winter in the Mojave desert. The Oscar-winning movie
The
English Patient was a key-inspiration for the video.
Madonna, who is a big fan of the |
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Anthony Minghella film, wanted
to recreate a similar feeling in her video.
Madonna is wearing henna / mehndi-tattoos on her hands. The
symbol on her palm is the
sanskrit-letter 'OM' which means 'The vibration
of the universe'.
Unfortunately, director Chris Cunningham had a hard time doing
this video. He gives more insight on the making of the video
in the booklet of his DVD release |
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The
Work of Director Chris Cunningham. The following
is an interview taken from this booklet:
Q: Would she have just seen 'Come
to Daddy' (Note: A previous video Chris Cunningham
directed for Aphex Twin) or would you have sent her
earlier work or...?
C: No, that's all she saw.
Q: That's brave of her for the
first single off |
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that
album... to go with such a distinct thing. It's not a traditional
pop video...
C: Before anyone else reacted to 'Come to Daddy', she
was in there first.
Q: Were you surprised when you heard
she was interested?
C: Yeah, that's when things started hotting up. It seems normal
now. But back then it seemed like a joke to me. I remember
telling Richard James and him laughing!
Q: How did you first find out, was it
through your production company or did you get a call direct
from Warner.
C: She wanted to meet. She was in town I think. So I went
to her house and met her.
Q: Were you nervous?
C: Not at all. I was nervous when I met Richard James for
the first time because I admired his music so much. But Madonna
was what my little sister listened to. She was really nice
though. I got lucky again because the track was quite cinematic
and I knew I could do something with it. If it has been Ray
of Light, I probably would have had trouble coming up
with an idea.
Q: What was the treatment?
C: With that video I wrote a treatment which was pretty ambitious.
It had motion control and helicopter shots in the desert,
which was dumb. There was a monsoon |
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and
the equipment got rained in and what was a four-day
shoot was eventually whittled down to a two-day shoot.
The original treatment was like, massive piles of bodies
in the desert. All these figurative sculptures made
of bodies that were all multiple Madonnas. They were
all going to split and break up and change into ravens
and then change into dogs. Just a performance video,
but a really elaborate one using her, her clothes and
any shapes that would come out |
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of her clothes. Her black dress
would form shapes and I would limit myself to really stark
backdrops and her. It was 'some visuals' in search
of an 'idea'. I ended up shooting fragments and having
to stitch together in post something that vaguely resembled
the original treatment. I think I was pretty depressed after
doing that video too, because it was a similar experience
to the Autechre video. Having something too vague in my head
that I never quite organized into something coherent.
Q: Was it just because of timing and
delays and motion control that you weren't able to achieve
what you wanted?
C: It was all those things but mostly a lack of organisation
on my part.
Q: What about the styling?
C: Jean-Paul Gaultier had made a beautiful collection of gothic
dresses that year and Madonna asked if I was ok with incorporating
them into the video. I was more than happy to. We spent an
afternoon with Madonna, trying on all these different dresses
and I picked 2 or 3. The look I wanted was a kind of gothic
John C. Waterhouse hybrid. His paintings are one of my main
passions, I never get bored of staring at them. They have
a really powerful dreamlike atmosphere, not to mention the
most beautiful women ever painted, which has been an influence
on me since I was a child.
Q: In the end how did it come together,
what made it the video it is now?
C: The reason I never put it on my showreel was because I
wanted to cut out all |
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I didn't like any of the effects shots. I didn't think
they were good enough. No matter what I went through
to get these shots, I would rather have just had the
shots of her singing in the desert dancing around with
the cloak on. That would have been enough for me. But
the record company and she insisted that I kept those
shots in. They had cost too much. I decided not to work
with a big artist again because those decisions should
be mine. |
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Q: That's almost the opposite of the
usual battle with a label that artists want more performance
shots and less conceptual footage.
C: And they wold be right in most cases. With most really
big artists who have plenty of charisma, I would rather just
see them signing against a brick wall than have to sit through
some video director's conceptual bollocks. A four-minute take
of Madonna dancing in the desert would be far more captivating
than some silly motion control shots. It looked pretty stylish,
though. |
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Also noteable: This is the first
video that contains the costume-styling of Arianne Phillips.
Arianne works with Madonna since late 1997 and is responsible
for most of her looks since then. She's also the costume designer
of Madonna's Drowned
World Tour and the re-Invention
World Tour. Madonna wears a Jean-Paul Gaultier-creation
in the 'Frozen'-Video.
The 'Frozen' video is commercially available on Madonna's
Video
Collection 93:99 DVD (available from Amazon.com)
and was also included on the The
Work of Director Chris Cunningham DVD. |
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