When Madonna came to Ronda
Thirty years on, the untold story behind the bullfighting-themed music video for Madonna’s Take a Bow.
Known as La Ciudad Soñada (the city of dreams), Ronda has been a favourite with international visitors since the time of the 18th-century Grand Tour. Photo: rainhard2 via Pixabay
In November 1994, a 60-strong film crew arrived in Ronda – a picturesque clifftop city in southern Spain – to shoot the music video for Madonna’s ballad Take a Bow.
Word of the megastar’s arrival had well and truly got out, and the narrow streets of the medieval old town were clogged with curious locals and paparazzi.
“There were cameras on every single steeple, every single rooftop,” remembers the video’s director, Michael Haussman, on a video call from his studio in Rome. He kindly agreed to an interview after I’d exhausted all online sources in my quest to find out what brought the Queen of Pop to Ronda, having seen a still from the video on a visitor information panel at one of the filming locations.
Turns out it’s quite a story. What began as a concept sketched out on napkins in a Paris restaurant ended up with Haussman pulling off something unheard of: filming a bullfight where not a drop of blood was spilt. To do so, he first had to earn the trust of real-life matador Emilio Muñoz, who plays Madonna’s lover in the video.
But before we get any further into the backstory, let’s take a moment to enjoy Take a Bow, in all its sepia-toned vintage glamour:
The first thing I wanted to know was: why bullfighting? Whose idea was it to set this tale of doomed love against a backdrop of Spain’s fiesta nacional?
To set the scene, in 1994, Haussman – originally from the United States – was living in London. “I had always been fascinated with the world of bullfighting,” he explains. “Just through literature, reading Hemingway’s The Sun also Rises, Dangerous Summer. But I’d never really been to a bullfight. I finally went, and I was immediately fascinated by the whole thing.”
Spending weekends in Spain and going to bullfights in the great plazas de toros (bullrings) of cities like Madrid and Seville meant that before too long, Haussman saw Emilio Muñoz in action. He became a huge fan.
“A bullfighter is kind of like an actor or a singer,” he says. “You like a certain person’s style. Whether you like Justin Bieber or Leonard Cohen, or Nick Cave… And Emilio Muñoz, besides the fact that he kind of looks like Al Pacino, in the world of bullfighting, he was the Leonard Cohen. He was the profound bullfighter.”
In the meantime, the opportunity to work with Madonna on Take a Bow came up. Haussman flew to Paris, where the singer was staying in the Ritz Hotel, to discuss the project.
Madonna had told him that the song was about falling in love with someone who was a public figure, “Someone that’s famous, and the problems that go with that.” His original concept was a scenario involving the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, and inspired by Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.
“She’d said, ‘Write something for the song but just don’t make it dark’. I’d come up with something, this Tarkovsky trip with her and Mastroianni. I went up to her hotel room and she said, ‘What did you think of the video?’ I said, ‘It’s dark’. She said, “Then don’t tell me. What have you been up to?’ She changed the subject,” he laughs.
“It was basically taking Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the character of Lady Brett Ashley, and setting it today.”
Haussman told her he’d been spending a lot of time going to Emilio Muñoz bullfights and recording them on his Bolex film camera.
“So I was explaining to her how I’d got into this, and Madonna’s kind of like a college kid – she gets attached to a subject, and when she gets into it she starts to ask a hundred questions and wants to know everything about it. And I told her everything that I knew, because I’d engulfed every book I could. I was reading the bullfighting magazine Seis Toros religiously. Every weekend that I could go, any time I was free, I was going [to Spain]. So I explained all that to her.”
The creative spark was lit and the pair brainstormed more ideas for the video over dinner that evening.
“The whole video was written on napkins while we ate Moroccan food, and it kind of wrote itself. It was basically taking Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the character of Lady Brett Ashley, and setting it today.
“I started sketching out the story, talking about scenes. I said, ‘There could be a great scene where you’re dressing for the fight, and he’s also dressing, because that’s a whole ritual in itself’. She also had a visual in mind, something from First Name: Carmen, which was a Jean-Luc Godard film, a scene of a character hunched over a TV. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful, we can put the bullfighter on TV, you could be in love with this TV…”
Later, in an interview about Take a Bow, Madonna would reflect on the aptness of the setting: “There’s cruelty involved in bullfighting, and I liked the metaphor in that, because obviously [the character] breaks my heart. And it’s not a happy ending in bullfighting either.”
The concept for the video was born. Next came the hard part.
Desperately seeking Emilio Muñoz
Naturally, Haussman had one particular bullfighter in mind for the video. After trying to reach Emilio Muñoz for several weeks to pitch the idea to him, he finally secured a meeting. Haussman and his production partner turned up to that initial rendezvous at Seville’s opulent Hotel Alfonso XIII full of anticipation.
“And of course, he doesn’t show up. Just his men do. And his men are great – they’re like something out of Goodfellas. So they’re feeling us out, you know.”
Haussman passed the test. Within a day or so, they were all meeting at the hotel again, this time with Muñoz.
“We started talking and explaining everything. I didn’t speak Spanish that well at that time, but I was trying to legitimise myself, and I remember saying to him, ‘I can tell you what outfit you wore in Madrid, it was dark olive green, and I can tell exactly the passes you did with the bull, I can tell you what happened in Seville...’”
It turned out that Muñoz had sent his team ahead of time because he suspected he was being set up.
“He thought it was a wind-up, like one of those hidden camera shows. He was apprehensive until I started telling him everything I knew. And so I said, ‘let’s you and I go across the street and get a beer and let these guys talk’. And we just became best of friends from that moment on.”
A bullfight in search of a ring
The next piece of the puzzle was finding the locations. According to much of the online lore, the original choice for the bullfight scene was Ronda’s historic plaza de toros. But Haussman says it was never in the running.
Instead, he wanted to shoot in Seville’s majestic Real Maestranza de Caballería, known as Spain’s cathedral of bullfighting, where he had seen Emilio Muñoz in action.
Seville’s Real Maestranza de Caballería. Photo: Manuel Velasco via Canva.com
“I’d written [the video treatment] around that. I wanted the sand that colour, I wanted the white arches up top. I knew that ring so well. I knew where the bulls entered, you could sit above it. That’s where I wanted Madonna sitting.
“So when I went to Ronda, which had the best locations for the interiors and streets, the bullring there is a very small, antiquated, gorgeous, historic place. They even fight in old costumes.
“It’s amazing in that context, but it’s not like the bullrings we know, it didn’t have that modern element. The whole thing’s arcaded, so everyone’s in shadow. And it’s small. I couldn’t get the shots I really wanted. It would be almost like you’re doing a period piece on bullfighting. For all these reasons, it didn’t work.”
Ronda’s plaza de toros. Photo: Amy Macpherson
As part of his campaign to get permission to film in Seville’s Maestranza, Haussman had met with Antonio Ordóñez, of the legendary Ordóñez bullfighting dynasty. The same Antonio Ordóñez who was one of the protagonists of Hemingway’s nonfiction work Dangerous Summer.
“From day one he was so frigging nice. He was great. I went over to his house for dinner, and he said to me: ‘do you want to pay your respects to Orson Welles?’ His ashes are buried at my house’. And so we went to his finca and there are Orson Welles’s ashes.” (The US filmmaker was a friend of Ordóñez and a great aficionado of bullfighting).
Nonetheless, the bid was unsuccessful.
“They were never going to let us in the Maestranza. Madonna was so, like… the Catholic church hated her. And the Maestranza [the society which oversees the bullring] is like a Catholic order.”
It was Ordoñez who suggested what would end up being the filming location for the bullring scenes.
“Antonio said, ‘why don’t you just shoot it in Antequera? It looks the same anyway. It’s like a miniature version of the Maestranza’.” Antequera, a small city in Málaga province, also had the advantage of being just an hour and a half’s drive from Ronda.
“We went there and they basically gave us the keys, like, anything you want, you know. They were so thrilled to have us there,” Haussman remembers.
An unexpected hitch
Time for a very quick recap of some bullfighting basics, for reasons that will become obvious. According to the highly ritualised nature of Spanish bullfighting, each corrida (bullfight) has a set sequence and cast of players.
In the opening acts, the cuadrilla (team of bullfighters) enter the ring and greet the presidente (bullring authority). The matador brandishes a large cape called a capote, typically magenta on one side and yellow on the other, to test the bull’s strength, speed and reactions. The picadores, who are on horseback and carry long lances, attempt to jab the bull. Next come the banderilleros (flag men) whose goal is to plant their barbed flags in its shoulders.
These preliminary stages are part of tempering the bull’s strength and controlling its head positioning, in preparation for the later phase when the matador faces up to it with a smaller red cape called a muleta. Finally, if all goes to plan, he dispatches the bull by plunging a sword between its shoulder blades. If you pay close attention to the video for Take a Bow, you’ll notice all of these phases referenced – but with one very important difference.
“If the bull’s bleeding, we’re done.”
“My original idea was to do a real bullfight, kind of documentary-style. Real picadors, real banderilleros, everything,” Haussman tells me. “And then [animal rights activists] PETA started getting hold of this and started talking to Madonna.
“She was having these conversations with me, like, we can’t harm the bull. And I was saying, ‘then Emilio’s going to have a really hard time fighting with the muleta because it’s based on the bull’s head being lower, it’s a smaller cape. I don’t know if he’s going to do this’.”
“I told his guys and they were like, this is not going to happen. So I got Emilio on the phone, and we started talking it through.”
The pair racked their brains to come up with a solution. “I was like, ‘if the bull’s bleeding, we’re done’. He just said, ‘let me think about it’. Those were his last words”.
With two days to go before the start of filming, Haussman still hadn’t heard back from the matador.
“Madonna’s arriving, Emilio’s supposed to arrive, we’re supposed to do the big press thing. We were like, is he even going to come? He still hasn’t talked to anyone,” he laughs. “It was really dramatic.”
But Muñoz turned up when he said he would. “I remember hugging him, and he had a nickname for me which was Corleone, Michael Corleone. And so he whispers in my ear, ‘don’t worry Corleone, everything’s going to be OK’.”
Antequera’s plaza de toros. Photo: Andrey X via Canva.com
In the end, Muñoz did what had previously been unthinkable. He “fought” a bull that had never been touched by a picador or banderillero.
“The rule was we couldn’t have anyone in there, no press, no one could watch this happen. For a lot of reasons. One was, you just don’t do that as a bullfighter, you don’t fight that way.
“And the second thing was because of what happened. Because it was beautiful, it went fine without the bull being hurt. If people had seen that they would have said, ‘hey now, we can change the rules here. We can have bullfights where these bulls just walk away, you know? Doesn’t have to be killed’.
“So everything in that bullfight… there are some really dangerous passes… really low, and the bull was never touched. What we witnessed in that ring, no one had ever seen that done by a really great bullfighter. That kind of encompasses how much we went through to put this thing together.”
And as for the bull? There were actually three that were contracted for the shoot. As Madonna later told MTV, “After they've been in this they’re no good for fighting any more. They’re going to spend the rest of their lives eating grass. I saved three bulls!”
With the fight scenes completed early in the shoot, the production headed back to Ronda.
On the Madonna trail: then and now
What was it about this little city that sealed the deal for the film crew?
“Well, it just was the most beautiful streets, and then we found this kind of abandoned building we could turn into a “hotel”, we could use the different rooms for different scenes, it had a great staircase,” Haussman recalls.
The building in question is the Casa del Rey Moro (House of the Moorish King). Despite its name, the house itself was built long after Spain’s Islamic era, but its grounds contain an original Nasrid-dynasty water mine along with elegant terraced gardens. The mine and the gardens can be visited by the public, but the house has been closed for renovations for some time.
The Casa del Rey Moro, Ronda. Photo: Amy Macpherson
Once Seville’s bullring was out of the picture, Haussman had revised his original plan of shooting some of the exterior scenes in that city’s historic heart, as well as the Ronda interiors.
“I knew Seville, I didn’t know Ronda. I was writing around what I knew, the Jewish neighbourhood, the juderia and all that... And then the minute I went to Ronda, I was like… holy cow… this is amazing.
“It ended up being, well – why don’t we try to keep everything in Ronda so we can just wake up and be there? It was really easy to do because it’s such a beautiful, beautiful town.”
It’s worth remembering what a massive global star Madonna was in the early ‘90s, and how eagerly anticipated her music videos were. The shoot wasn’t just big news in Spain. MTV dispatched a documentary team to make an on-location behind-the-scenes programme about it, presented by former Rolling Stone magazine editor and MTV VJ Kurt Loder.
Watching that MTV show reveals just how much of a logistical challenge the enormous interest on the ground was. Haussman confirms it: “We had to have a Madonna lookalike to take the press someplace else so we could shoot.”
Soon after her arrival in the city, Madonna had to decamp from her original accommodation to the much larger Parador Hotel for security reasons.
“We were in this really quaint, charming, three-story hotel, and then we realised that we were surrounded, and people could actually climb up and get in my bedroom window,” she tells Loder in the documentary.
Crowds aside, Madonna had high praise for Ronda.
“This is a deeply beautiful, beautiful, beautiful city. There’s no McDonald’s, there’s no 7-11, and I’m just enjoying that. Yesterday we were in a house that’s 500 years old. I love it here.”
One historic building that appears in the video is the Salvatierra Palace, with its heavy doors that swing open in the scene when Madonna is leaving for the bullfight. Beyond that shot, Haussmann recalls that the interiors were all shot in the Casa del Rey Moro.
Some other sites of note are the Mondragon Palace (Kurt Loder conducts his main interview with Madonna in the courtyard here), and the B&B where Haussman stayed during the shoot. It also happens to be the hotel where Madonna first stayed before swiftly relocating to the Parador.
Then, it was called the Posada del Rey. It has changed names a few times over the years and is now known as the Canaan Boutique Hotel. They still have a “Madonna room”.
And finally, the Church of the Holy Spirit, where - according to local reports - Madonna took some time out for quiet reflection during the shoot.
Candles, couture, and a suit of lights
A lot of the video’s seductive visual impact comes from the sequence that Madonna and Haussmann dreamed up over that dinner in Paris: a montage that cuts between the singer dressing in her hotel room and Muñoz dressing in his.
A bullfighter’s outfit is known as a traje de luces (suit of lights) due to the dazzling effect of its intricate embroidery of metallic threads and sequins, all of which is done by hand by specialised tailors.
There are clear parallels with the world of high fashion, so it’s fitting that the clothes Madonna wears in the video were straight off the catwalk. Both the lace-edged corset and the tailored suit were from designer John Galliano’s October 1994 show (the corset was worn by Naomi Campbell).
The video takes us inside the intimate and seldom-seen space of a bullfighter’s dressing room, where everything from the placement of the garments and accessories to the order of putting them on has a precise ritual. It even has its own choreography, such as the moment when Muñoz pirouettes slowly into the shot while his mozo de espada (sword bearer) fastens him into his suit.
“That thing in his room when he twirls, that’s real,” Haussman says. “I’d seen that with him when they showed me [how he dresses]. And I was like, oh my god, we’re filming that. That’s the shot right there.”
Although it wasn’t the original concept for the video and was only chosen because of Haussman’s interest in the subject, bullfighting – with all of its ritual and theatricality – ended up fitting the song and its lyrics like a glove.
Even the Catholic imagery and paraphernalia of the bullfighting world chimed with Madonna’s long (and often controversial) history of using crucifixes and other iconography in her videos.
And although the video has a vintage feel, as Haussman points out, the aesthetics of bullfighting have a timeless quality. Matadors today dress much as they did a century ago.
“When you look at a bullfighter’s stuff, at his little cards, the things that they use, the candles, the sword cases wrapped in leather and tied – everything is so traditional. Obviously I was going for a The Sun Also Rises vibe, but so much of that was being driven by what really existed in the bullfighting world, and what really exists in Spain, you know. We were keeping to that.”
The video was a commercial and critical hit, but on top of that, it was well-received in the bullfighting world, thanks to Haussman’s emphasis on authenticity. He went on to make a follow-up in which Madonna and Muñoz reprise their roles (the video for her song You’ll See, released in 1995).
He also went on to make a documentary, The Last Serious Thing (the title references a Gabriel Garcia Lorca quote about bullfighting), featuring Muñoz and the young Francisco Ordóñez, Antonio’s grandson. But since then, he has had little to do with the world of los toros.
“It was a really special period in my life, because I was really into it, long after the video,” he muses. “And then you kind of like… I’m not sure if I’d want to go to one now, you know? Like it’s not really my thing. It’s just one of those life chapters. The bullfighting chapter.”
The chapter might have closed, but it seems that for Madonna, the creative spark lit by the video kept smouldering – and perhaps even the Ronda connection. In 2015, her team commissioned a custom traje de luces for her to wear during her Rebel Heart world tour, and the company they turned to was the Málaga-founded Toroshopping.
© Amy Macpherson, 2024.