The Paradise Not For Me video shot as a backdrop for Drowned Tour is considered by many one of her best video works.Here are some tidbits, the video director Dago González shared with us at MadonnaTribe.
The song is about suicide so we show Madonna getting ready to enter the " other side". It is a performance video so the story is really told by the lyrics and Madonna's intention as she delivers each line. Arianne Phillips worked on the wardrobe. We were going to use the kimono from the "Nothing Really Matters" video, but Arianne found this elder Japanese woman here in Los Angeles and she had this fantastic wedding kimonos that were from centuries ago, so we presented them to Madonna an she absolutely loved the one we ended up using on the video. Madonna was walking on these Japanese shoes which are wooden and they're very difficult to walk on. She started walking on them and she was doing a kind of shake and I told her "in the next shot I want you to walk exactly this way." In post production we ramped it so it had more of a robotic feel. It worked great and it ended up being incorporated onto the stage choreography. While we were editing for the tour, she kept telling me to hold back on the cuts (I did not get it at the time, I felt it could become too slow) but once I went back and looked at the footage I realized how right she was- There are takes were you don't have to do a single cut because there is so much emotion and subtext behind every line that she delivers. I was never really happy with the last scene of the video where the spirit is supposed to escape her. We tried different versions at that time and nothing was really working, so we ended up with the one that worked the best, but I re-did it this time so what in the original video happens to be like rays of light coming out, out of her mouth comes out this black ink, and is very cool.
Thanks Madonna Tribe!
