Bill Condon on ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman,’ working With Jennifer Lopez

Bill Condon is no stranger to the movie musical. He wrote 2002’s Chicago and went on to direct both Oscar-winner Dreamgirls and Disney hit Beauty and the Beast. This past winter Condon debuted his latest, The Kiss of the Spider Woman, in an unexpected locale: The Sundance Film Festival.

While it has debuted its fair share star power, Sundance is more known for quiet dramas than splashy musicals starring one of the world’s biggest popstars. (It should be noted that this wasn’t Condon’s first time at the fest — Gods and Monsters, for which he won an Oscar, debuted in Park City in 1998.) But the Eccles proved a warm venue for the film, which had audiences clapping for star Jennifer Lopez’s showstopping turn and the film earned overwhelmingly positive reviews.

Condon’s The Kiss of the Spider Woman — based on a 1976 novel by Argentinean author Manuel Puig, which was adapted for the big screen in 1985 (landing William Hurt a best actor Oscar) and then became a Tony-winning 1993 Broadway musical from legendary songwriting team John Kander and Fred Ebb — focuses on two cellmates, Valentíno (Diego Luna), a political prisoner with hopes of overthrowing the dictatorship, and Molina (Tonatiuh), a queer window dresser convicted of public indecency. The two form a bond when, to pass the time, Molina recounts the plot of a Hollywood musical starring his favorite star, Ingrid Luna (Lopez).

Ahead of The Kiss of the Spider Woman screening at another film festival, this time the Locarno, Condon talked to THR about why he made the film independently and the future of movie musicals in Hollywood.

What was your relationship to The Kiss of the Spider Woman — the 1985 movie and the musical?

Seeing that movie in my late 20s as a gay man that was pretty remarkable. William Hurt playing a gay hairdresser, he was one of the first actors, at the height of his heat, to take on a role like that — that was incredible. And then the musical, obviously I’m a huge lover of Kander and Ebb and great musical theater — really, really powerful musical dramas. Then I wrote the Chicago script, and that’s what got me thinking of it as a movie, because it did feel like there was such a connection between Spider Woman and Cabaret and Chicago. It struck me that Molina and Roxy Hart and Sally Bowles are cut from the same cloth. They were all looking to show biz to kind of escape from a difficult life.

What was it that made your finally attempt your own Kiss of the Spider Woman?

I finally decided to do something about it around 10 years ago. I went to meet with John Kander, whom I knew from Chicago, and I’m so happy to say Terrence McNally, who’d written the libretto for the musical. I pitched them on what I wanted to do in a movie, including being truer to the original novel than they had been able to be. In 1993, the musical, like the movie that preceded it, was forced to make the central love story a bit transactional, because I think the idea of a fluidity in this straight character was something that is all over the novel, but they were already breaking such ground by just having two guys make love in a Broadway musical that they had to temper [the sexual fluidity] a little. Also, the proto-Trans nature of Molina was a reason to do it again. Then, of course, there was a seven, eight-year brick wall of getting the rights. There were people who claimed to have the rights. It was a very long detour.

Did you all ever consider the studio route?

I knew the only way to make it, the way it needed to be made, was independently. It’s never been as mainstream as those other two Kander and Ebb musicals. It is the darkest of them, in a way, and it is set in a prison. There is brutality in it. For me, it was a mirror image of what I did with Gods and Monsters. With Gods and Monsters, I bought that novel and I sat there and I wrote it on spec and then waited. It took 18 months to get the money together, and we came to Sundance without distribution, and then made a deal. It was the same thing here. This is an advantage when you’ve made movies: in writing it you can kind of write something almost to whatever means you’re going to have to make it. Making a lower-budget musical usually means it’s not going to be a good musical. The idea I had was: It it two movies. It’s the prison, which is the movie we ultimately made in Uruguay for 10 percent of the entire budget. Then there are the musical numbers, but the thing that makes it doable is that that’s 35 minutes of the movie. So you weren’t making a two hour musical, you’re making 35 minute musical. There were no cut corners there, there was just less of it.

Where did the musical numbers shoot?

In New Jersey, the hellish corners of New Jersey of converted warehouses and things like that. (Laughs.) The idea of Jennifer Lopez being driven there every day is like, “Oh, my God. I hope, she has like blinders on where she can’t see where we are taking her, because it’s like terrifying!” The office I had looked out on this swamp where you just knew that everyone from the Sopranos was showing up every week to dump a body. It was that kind of production, but it was fun.

Why was Jennifer Lopez the right person for this part?

Jennifer Lopez is the reason this movie got made. There’s only one person who could play this diva. We don’t have that many divas. I can count them on one hand. And then how many of them are great dancers, singers and Latin? I think there’s only one. She handed our producer the Golden Globe for Dreamgirls, and I met her that night. She was talking about how much she wanted to make musicals. So, I just had this faith that this would speak to her.

Was there any one musical number or sequence that you were most concerned about getting right?

It felt like every day. Jennifer shot in a little under four weeks, and then she was done. It was crazy. In any typical musical, you shoot over 12 weeks, and you do at most one number a week. She’s doing one number every day, practically. We shot the musical numbers as much as we could in the style of a 40s, 50s musical, which were all informed by what Fred Astaire said when he came to Hollywood: “I want to be full body as much as I can and I want to do it without cuts as much as I can.” He wanted movie audiences to know that all that stuff he was doing, he was actually doing. That was how musicals were shot until basically Cabaret and Bob Fosse where the editing became choreography. There is this number called “Give Me Love,” and we only had one day to shoot it — it was right toward the end. We made it but there was a little sense of, “God, are we running on fumes now?” It’s an elaborate number — she comes into the club, starts dancing, goes to the first tableau, goes onto the bar, jumps off the bar onto the floor and runs. Jennifer did it all in one take and when we got that first take, it was like, “Oh my god, we have it.”

Are movie musicals best experienced in theaters?

I think it’s the only way for musicals. Jennifer has a few moments where you just start applauding, it is built in because it comes out of theatrical roots. I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of three different musicals. For Dreamgirls, I would love showing up in different neighborhoods and [seeing] young girls singing along to Beyonce. I grew up at the tail end of those overblown roadshow musicals. For Beauty and the Beast at the El Capitan theater in LA, we had an overture and we had programs and it was exactly like what it had been like when I was a little kid. It’s just unthinkable to me that that you’d make a movie musical where you didn’t have its first exposure be with audience.

What is the current industry appetite for the movie musical?

The movie musicals have been dying since 1931. They made so many of them right after [1927’s] Jazz Singer that audiences said, “No more!” And they were they were gone until 42nd Street revived them. Look at the 80s and 90s. The 90s has Evita and that’s all. They went dormant. Then at the beginning of this century, with Moulin Rouge and Chicago, they came back. It’s a shame that it does feel as if every movie musical carries the weight of the genre on its back. We can point to the ones that didn’t work in the last few years and everyone gets scared off. And, frankly, the ones that work in a huge way — like Wicked and Beauty and the Beast — the genre doesn’t get credit for them, because people say, “Oh, that’s a brand.” I really will give props to Roadside and Lionsgate that the movie is being sold [as a musical] 100 percent in the trailers. This is a musical, there’s no question.