For some strange reason, Madonna is the May cover girl for Interview Magazine. The interview is conducted by director Gus Van Sant, also for some unknown reason. The complete piece is here, but I’ll just do the highlights. Madge talks about Malawi, and her kids, but mostly she’s trying to front like she and Gus Van Sant are totally directing colleagues. She talks a lot about the movie she directed, Filth and Wisdom, and her upcoming project W.E., which is supposed to be about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, sort of. Here’s more:

Madge on Malawi: “Yeah. I go to Malawi twice a year. It’s where two of my children were adopted from, and I have a lot of projects there that I go and check up on and children who I look after. It’s sort of a commitment that I’ve made to this country and the hundreds of thousands of children there who have been orphaned by AIDS. I made a documentary about it [I Am Because We Are, 2008], and it’s just become part of my life. I’m going to meet with Jeffrey Sachs [the economist]. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. He’s starting a global education initiative, and I’m going to be his Girl Friday, so to speak. We’re going to hold a press conference to talk about the school for girls that I’m building in Malawi. It’s kind of our way of making sure that every kid has a chance to have an education-more specifically girls, but boys as well. Girls, though, in a lot of developing countries don’t have the opportunity to go to school, nor are they encouraged to go to school, so what we’re doing is the beginning of a dream. But I’m going to Malawi for lots of reasons.”

On Jeffrey Sachs (who developed the Millenium Village program): “We’ve been supporting each other for years now. I’ve worked on some Millennium Villages with him. We have two Millennium Village sites in Malawi, and they’re both doing very well. He’s an incredible human being. He’s extremely charismatic. Very well-spoken and charming. He’s one of the few people I know who talks the talk and also walks the walk. He thinks very big. his work is primarily focused on ending poverty, but you know, there are lots of ways to skin the cat. Millennium Villages are an experiment that he has tried all over the world. It costs a certain amount of money, and it takes a certain number of years for them to work, but he’s got it down almost to a science, where for $1.5 million over a five-year period, you can make a series of interconnected villages self-sustainable through education and prepping and diversifying their crops and giving them agricultural tools and medicine and knowledge. Jeffrey has been really supportive of all the work I’ve done in Malawi. So, yeah, we’ll be drinking a gin and tonic and swatting away the mosquitoes down there.

On Sean Penn: Madge agrees with Van Sant that Sean is “amazing” and says, regarding Sean’s work in Haiti, “He’s got a fire under his ass, that’s for sure. A bee in his bonnet.”

On HIV/AIDS and the art community: “I guess it’s just coming from that world in Michigan and the trajectory of my life: after going to New York and being a dancer when the whole AIDS epidemic started and nobody knew what it was. And then suddenly, all these beautiful men around me, people who I loved so dearly, were dying-just one after the next. It was just such a crazy time. And watching the world freak out-the gay community was so ostracized.

Madge isn’t really doing a movie about the Duchess of Windsor after all: “The movie everyone thinks I’m making that’s supposed to be a musical about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. I don’t know why that got in the newspapers. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor are in the movie, but it’s not going to be about them. It’s really about this other woman’s journey, and the duchess is kind of her spiritual guide. It’s set mostly in pre-World War II England-like, 1936 to 1937-and then in New York in 1998. It goes back and forth in time. I use the Sotheby’s auction in 1998 of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s estate as a device to flash backward from.”

On collaboration: “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.”

[From Interview Magazine]

She had more interesting stuff to say about the Windsors, but I didn’t know who would really be interested, so if you do like that stuff, you should definitely read the full article. Now, can I just say a few words about Madge? She doesn’t come across as horrible in this interview, but I’ve finally figured out what her most marked personality trait is – she is ruthlessly narcissistic. Like, she will turn the conversation back on herself so fast, your head will spin. She will literally make anything and everything about Madonna, and only Madonna. It’s totally crazy.

Madonna photos courtesy of Interview Magazine and CoverAwards.