We spoke in her sitting room, where a Fernand Léger painting presides from above the fireplace. A large coffee table was neatly stacked with books and folders of photographs that Madonna has been using for research as she works on the screenplay for her next film project, based on the novel “The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells.”

Imposing cream-colored couches flanked the coffee table, but Madonna preferred sitting on the floor.

For the interview, she had raced home from a wardrobe fitting for coming performances. “I’m wearing half a costume,” she said. She was dressed in black, with stylishly chunky shoes, diamond-patterned tights, black shorts, a button-fronted T-shirt and a half-length jacket with black feathers sprouting from the shoulders. Her fingernails were black and glittery, and she had little silvery crucifix earrings; a skull-shaped ring was on one finger.

Madonna has been performing the single “Living for Love” on awards shows, wearing a matador outfit and surrounded by bare-chested men outfitted with bulls’ horns. On Feb. 25, she took a dangerous tumble in London at the Brit awards, the British equivalent of the Grammys. A dancer was supposed to pull off her cape, but it was tied too tightly and she was yanked backward onto stairs, suffering whiplash. Seconds later, she got up and kept dancing. “I didn’t feel anything when it happened,” she said. “I just remember falling backward, and I hit the back of my head. But I had so much adrenaline pumping, and I was so taken by surprise that I just was, O.K., I have to keep going. So I just got back onstage, and I just kept going.”

She continued: “If I wasn’t in good shape, I wouldn’t have survived that fall. But I’m strong. I know how to fall — I ride horses. And I have core strength, and I know that saved me. That and my guardian angels. I believe that there’s the physical world and the metaphysical world, and I do believe that they are intertwined — as above, so below. So I think both were at work in the protection of me.”