What was the most expensive music video of the 1980s?
Like most things Madonna has done over her career, right from the 1980s to now, her actions come at a cost.
When she wore a cape at the Brits in 2015, that meant she fell from the stage, and when she announced to the crowd at Coachella last weekend, while performing with Sabrina Carpenter, that she was wearing the very same outfit that she had at the festival 20 years ago, that meant her clothes got nicked. Choices have consequences, after all.
However, one thing that was possibly more in her control was the expenses of her music videos, of which there were many. If you want a case study in how music videos transformed into full-scale productions, you only have to look so far as Madonna’s back catalogue, with filming schedules and budgets that would genuinely put Hollywood to shame.
Of course, a major part of this was helped along by the fact that she enlisted David Fincher to direct some of her most illustrious shoots, at a time before he would leap off into the stratosphere of the filmmaking elite. The whole point was that Fincher’s work with Madonna catapulted him into a whole other world, from which he’d never look back.
To this end, in terms of the high-octane stakes of the art they created together, ‘Express Yourself’ took the crown for the most expensive music video of the 1980s, costing an eye-watering total of $5million to make for its release in 1989. Do you want to know something even worse, though? That’s equivalent to around $12.99m in today’s money.
‘Express Yourself’: the most expensive music video of the 1980s?
Those big bucks made the video the most expensive ever made at the time, and now still the third-most expensive in history, usurped only by Michael and Janet Jackson with ‘Scream’, and Madonna herself with her 2002 James Bond theme, ‘Die Another Day’. When you already had the title, it was genuinely quite impressive that she managed to overtake herself, over a decade down the line.
Yet before all that in the future, the actual process of getting ‘Express Yourself’ over the line was its own hurdle to jump first. Fincher proposed the idea of Madonna being a masochist with men as her slaves, which she then developed into her own masculine persona. Warren Beatty, who she was dating at the time, was asked to play a slave – but he declined.
“Madonna wanted the video as a showcase of her sexual prowess, I never wanted to be a part of it,” he said, firmly putting an end to that full affair. With or without Beatty’s starring role, the production was already going to incur exorbitant costs, so they may as well have tried for the whole hog. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the video where Madonna said she had the most control.
Whether or not it was the nail in the coffin to her relationship with Beatty is a completely different discussion altogether, but the point remains that the impact of the video was clear for all to see. By the simple mantra of ‘Express Yourself’, Madonna was putting her money where her mouth is – and in this case, a whole $5million.
