Interview: Bill Condon Brings Kiss of the Spider Woman to the Silver Screen

“When I made Beauty and the Beast,” writer-director Bill Condon remembers, “I would go to watch it at the El Capitan, which is the movie palace on Hollywood Boulevard. There was an overture and a light show, and there were programs and memorabilia. I wanted to duplicate what I experienced when I went to see Oliver! and Funny Girl at the Criterion or the Rivoli. Here, it’s the same thing. I pinch myself when I see the commercials, because for a minute, you can pretend you’re back in a world where these things used to happen on an annual basis.”

Condon is referring to his new film adaptation of John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Terrence McNally’s musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, starring Tonatiuh and Diego Luna as cellmates in an Argentine prison, and global superstar Jennifer Lopez as the silver screen diva who haunts their dreams. Despite the cinematic bent of the musical and its Manuel Puig source material, a movie-musical of Kiss of the Spider Woman was never a forgone conclusion; as Condon says, it’s the ultimate cult musical that’s not been seen on Broadway since its Tony-winning premiere in 1993.

And yet, in actually getting it off the ground, Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman completes a Kander and Ebb triptych that began with Bob Fosse’s Cabaret and continued with Rob Marshall’s Chicago. Now he’s getting to put his own stamp on a showbiz fantasy and prison nightmare, dressing it up for the big screen in the only way he knew how.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I enjoyed the movie, as any theater person would—
Not any. There are always issues, right?

Yeah, the chat boards always tell their own story, don’t they?
Exactly.

And I guess that’s because you give Kiss of the Spider Woman the Fosse-Cabaret treatment instead of doing a more straightforward adaptation. Why did you decide to work it that way?
I thought it was the obvious choice—Cabaret did that and dropped a lot of great songs. It’s its own thing. It’s the same with Chicago and Rob Marshall’s idea of putting every number onto the stage in Roxie’s imagination. And I think lesson always is, it hasn’t done anything to the show. The movie exists and the show exists. That’s what I keep wanting to remind purists: no one’s touched the show. In fact, with any luck, if this movie gets an audience, the show will finally come back.

But the template just seemed so clear. This is like the third panel of the triptych of Kander and Ebb musicals. Like Sally Bowles, like Roxie Hart, Molina has a difficult reality and escapes from that into show business. I keep thinking that one of the common denominators there is Fred Ebb.

How so?
He loved everything about show business, the tawdry part, the glorious part. Manuel Puig was a bit of a model for Molina, but I always thought that it had to channel a little Fred Ebb, too. Certainly, his nasty wit. Anyway, once I decided that, the second decision was to create the movie within the movie-musical, called Kiss of the Spider Woman, and then figure out what songs in the score could fit into that. I went right back to the SUNY Purchase production. I went back to drafts that Puig wrote with Fred Ebb.

You did get some deep cuts in there.
Three of them, and almost a fourth, because there was one that we filmed but it fell by the wayside when we were honing the movie. That’s why I was so eager to have the album out before, and to have interviews like this to prepare people. The music has got such scale and scope, so I can imagine a diehard fan coming in like, “Why are we getting these Kander and Ebb ditties?” But it’s because they fit into the overall conception.

Tell me about some of the iconic numbers left on the cutting room floor.
“Dressing Them Up” is such a great song that I could not figure out how to get into the movie within the movie. I did shoot “The Day After That” and it was tough not to include. Molina takes something Valentin is saying and imagines it, but I didn’t really believe it. It felt like we were diminishing what was happening in reality. It was a noble effort, but it didn’t work.

What kind of input did Terrence McNally have before he passed.
Terrence was so generous; he was like, “You make movies, do what you think is best.” More than that, we did talk about the fact that, for a 1993 Broadway audience, there were some edges that had to be sanded off; specifically, some of the love story aspects. “Anything for Him” makes the ultimate love-making a bit transactional. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to take you on the journey where there was nothing transactional about it. It really was kind of pure and it leads to a moment of sacrifice that isn’t manipulated. Plus, I wanted to explore the gender fluidity aspects of the novel. And Terrence was like, “Go for it.”

You’ve said you shot, essentially, two movies: the 80-minute prison drama and the 40-minute musical. How did that work?
It was partly one of those things where it’s like, we’re not going to get a Beauty and the Beast budget to make this movie, right? It’s always been a cult musical, let’s face it. So, you want to be true to what it needs to be, but no one wants a budget musical. That’s an oxymoron. That’s when I thought we could make a 35-, 40-minute musical, and we can spend what it takes to make that lavishly, the way we want to, and then make an 80-minute, very, very independent movie in Uruguay. It was two movies back-to-back. 

What’s it like making a movie in Uruguay? You don’t hear about that as a shooting location very often.
It was a very convivial place to make a movie. It was much more civilized there than the part we shot in New Jersey. It was a great production company, and they would throw parties during the evening. We had a lot of Argentinian crew members and actors from Buenos Aires who had lived through the story through uncles and fathers and grandfathers and cousins who had been disappeared. The feeling of the novel, which is still taught in schools in Argentina, is really alive there.