The awful movie Madonna knew she wasn’t qualified to make: “I realised I needed help”
Nobody was devastated when Madonna announced that she was abandoning her acting career, apart from maybe the Razzies, since the organisation could no longer rely on her to populate several categories whenever she appeared in a movie, which was as close to a sure thing as anyone could hope to find.
The music industry icon and barometer of bad acting had won nine of them, but washing her hands of appearing onscreen permanently eliminated her from the equation. Die Another Day was the last time she appeared in a live-action film, and she’s avoided cinema entirely since a voice-only role in 2006’s Arthur and the Invisibles.
However, that didn’t mean she was done with filmmaking completely, with the ‘Queen of Pop’ segueing into directing instead. How did that go? About as well as her performative career, to be honest, with Madonna’s feature-length debut, Filth & Wisdom, which she also co-wrote, showing plenty of ambition without displaying any discernible talent or coherence.
On the plus side, and it’s a small plus, she was spared ‘Worst Picture’ and ‘Worst Director’ nods at the Razzies, so there’s that. Undeterred, Madge geared up for her sophomore effort, WE, and quickly realised that she’d bitten off more than she could chew with the historical drama.
It’s an Academy Award-nominated picture, though, after earning a ‘Best Costume Design’ nod, which is one of only two positives. It also won the Golden Globe for ‘Best Original Song’ thanks to Madonna’s own track ‘Masterpiece’, so it wasn’t a total washout despite recouping less than 20% of its production budget at the box office and tanking spectacularly.
As well as directing and producing, she’d also planned to write the screenplay alone until it became clear that she required assistance. With that, she brought in her Truth or Dare director, Alek Keshishian, to lend a hand, explaining to Interview that, in this case, two heads were vastly superior to one.
“I started writing it on my own, and then I realised that I needed help,” she said. “It’s just too big a subject. I quite like the idea of collaborating in general. Not only is it lonely to do things on your own creatively, it’s also kind of arrogant. I guess some people are brilliant enough to be brilliant on their own and never doubt anything and come up with fabulous things.”
Did it work? That’s hard to say, since WE is crap. It’s crap with two credited screenwriters, but it’s reasonable to assume that it would have been even worse had Madonna flown solo, since she admitted that she wasn’t capable of condensing the story she wanted to tell into a serviceable script without having a second pair of eyes and hands at her disposal.
Having failed at acting, her forays into directing didn’t go much better after back-to-back bombs that could barely cobble a half-decent review together to save their lives, which doesn’t bode well if she ever gets around to helming her own biopic, which sounded like a questionable idea from the start anyway.
