And that we could do anything on stage. Because the show was so demanding, so complex — whenever you go through something really intense with a group of people it brings you closer together. And ultimately, though I’d set out to document the show, just to get it on film, when I started looking at the footage I said, ‘This is so interesting to me. There’s a movie here. There’s something here’. She later told Good Morning America that her main intention was "to explode the myth that we raise up on a pedestal people we turn into icons. We make them inhuman and we don't give them human attributes so they're not allowed to fail, they're not allowed to make mistakes". Taraborrelli pointed out that Madonna gave Keshishian "full access to her world, complete entrée to her life during the tour's four months". To record Madonna and those around her with ease, the director would place the cameras behind one-way mirrors; he would have his crew wear black at all times, and gave them specific orders not to interact with the subjects. Each night after filming, he would log the day's events on a computer to keep track of the footage. The interviews with the tour's dancers and staff were done the first two weeks in Japan, while the performances were shot during the three Paris shows in July; this allowed Keshishian to "plan the numbers, to sit where I wanted them to be". The backstage footage was edited to be in black and white to give it a "vérité look", while the performances were edited to be in full color. Keshishian explained that "it seemed like an interesting division: the color for the artifice of the performance versus the reality of documentary, and yet each reflected the other". He also recalled that New Line Cinema, the film's original distributor, dropped it because of this. Over 200 hours of footage were shot, which took the director over a month and a half to edit and trim down to a reasonable length. The first cut was over 3 hours long, but Miramax executive Harvey Weinstein said that it was still too long and forced Keshishian to reduce it. Locations shot included the Calvary Cemetery and Mausoleum at Kawkawlin, Michigan. It counts with appearances by Al Pacino, Mandy Patinkin, Olivia Newton-John, Antonio Banderas, Sandra Bernhard, Kevin Costner, and Warren Beatty, whom