Sundance: Bill Condon On Revisiting ‘Kiss Of The Spider Woman’ After 40 Years & Turning Jennifer Lopez Loose In An MGM-Style Musical
EXCLUSIVE: Bill Condon brings Kiss of the Spider Woman to Sundance for the Sunday night Eccles Theater premiere of the festival’s most eagerly anticipated acquisition title, starring Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna and newcomer Tonatiuh. It has been 27 years since Condon redefined himself after premiering Gods and Monsters at Sundance, 32 years since Kiss of the Spider Woman opened on Broadway and won seven Tony Awards, and 40 years since the original Hector Babenco-directed film drew four Oscar nominations with the late William Hurt winning Best Actor. Condon has written and directed a compelling new version of a tale that is one part vibrant movie musical, and one part prison drama.
Given the recent wildfires in Southern California and the usual wariness that goes into acquiring indie films, it’s no surprise the Sundance market has gotten off to a slow start. But many hope things will open up after Kiss scores a deal for writer/director Condon and backers led by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Artists Equity. Here, Condon explains why he returned to the story of two cellmates, one of whom is a revolutionary being tortured for intel by a repressive Argentinian government. He is distracted from his pain each night as his window dresser cellmate paints a vivid picture by re-telling his favorite MGM-style musical. The cellmate was planted by the warden to extract information that will allow the government to apprehend the revolutionary’s cohorts and that brings its own pain as the men grow closer.
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DEADLINE: This seems like an unusual Sundance entry, a musical that is so polished and lavishly rendered. Jennifer Lopez works hard to prepare for all her roles, but you’ve created the perfect vehicle for her by turning her loose in a full blown MGM throwback musical.
BILL CONDON: It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? I do think having gotten to work with her in this idiom, that she is one of those people, and sometimes I think I might be too, who was born in the wrong time. The extraordinary talent that she has, she would have so flourished in the old studio system. This would be the 18th movie like this that she’d made, and it wouldn’t have happened so far into her career. It’s heartbreaking in a way to me because I think it does open up all these possibilities, and I hope she’s able to do many more of these, but it should have happened much earlier.
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When you talk about the odd thing for a Sundance movie, the thing I’d say is that, yeah, there’s a lavish Hollywood musical there, that’s about a third of the movie. And then the other part is a true independent drama that we made in Uruguay on a very quick schedule. But also the thing that makes it Sundance to me is the unicorn nature of it, those two movies are mashed together.
DEADLINE: The story of the relationship between the two men in the cell gives the film some grounding.
CONDON: So it’s this cross-pollinated, cross genre thing. But Jennifer, Jennifer. She has 11 musical numbers and we shot all of them in three and one-half weeks. Can you imagine? She would do one huge number, and then the next day she’s doing this huge dance number in the supper club. I don’t know anybody else who could do that.
DEADLINE: It’s easy to forget she got her start as a member of the Fly Girls dance troupe on In Living Color. So you knew she could dance. She’s made a lot of movies over the years, but this to me is the best turn for her since Out of Sight.
CONDON: I think it’s going to be a revelation for everybody. When you say Fly Girls, and you talk to her, she grew up in New York with a mother who loved the theater. So she was there, taking all of her dance classes on that track to be a Broadway performer dancer. But she got this gig as a teenager. I think it’s one of those things that’s kind of an embarrassment of riches, but hers is a path that’s gone so many different ways through television, then pop, and then obviously movies. This is her returning to something that she intended to do when she started.
DEADLINE: This would seem catnip for a lot of actresses who sing and dance. How did this become Jennifer’s vehicle?
CONDON: Well, I sat down and wrote this script with no deal involved or anything like that. Just like with Gods and Monsters years ago, when you do something speculative like that, you sort of have an image, well, how could I get this movie made? Because it’s not certainly an obvious studio movie. And it was to me, pure and simply Jennifer, she was the only person I had in mind. Not only was it, how do you get it made, but also that quality. It’s not only that she’s playing an actress from the period, she’s playing a diva, like Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner. They all have that extra oomph. We don’t grow that many divas anymore, but she’s one of them. It was so interesting. We auditioned hundreds of people across the globe for Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), and we did this one scene where he’s talking to the movie poster on the cell wall, and so many people had their own pictures of Jennifer Lopez that they were talking to. That kind of relationship of fans to someone who’s larger than life as she is, I think that’s something you can’t fake in a movie. She just has that extra charisma and glow, I think.
DEADLINE: The other revelation is this actor Tonatiuh, who plays the role that won William Hurt the Oscar 40 years ago, a gay man who is trying to pry information out of his cellmate to win his release.
CONDON: He was among hundreds who auditioned and you hone it down, and keep honing it down. We put him through his paces, in the dance scenes, and working with Diego. It became this thing where, the more I knew him, it became more obvious just what incredible gifts he would bring for all of the acting, singing, dancing. But more than that, that he really could embody this very, very complicated character. He has to hold the screen with Diego Luna in those scenes, and with Jennifer in the music scenes. And then there’s the other X factor. He’s got his own sort of wattage that keeps you looking at him, just as you’re looking at the two of them. That was the tough thing, finding the three together, who could really balance the movie.
DEADLINE: In the role of the revolutionary being tortured by his jailers, Diego Luna puts his own stamp on the role made famous four decades ago by the late Raul Julia.
CONDON: Just as Jennifer was the first and only choice, so was Diego. Because the thing I really think about this version is that it is more explicitly a love story. That was a quality. I think the intelligence and the open-mindedness that is innate in him, that he brings to every role, was just crucial. That curiosity and open-mindedness that makes you believe he’s someone who starts really not liking this window dresser that he has to share his cell with. He has that quality that makes it believable he would start to open up as the film progresses. It took a bit of coaxing because he was intrigued and wanted to do the musical part, but he’s a perfectionist, so he wanted to make sure that if he did it, he’d have enough time to really do it well. But for me, I’ve had the good luck to work with a handful of just flat-out great actors. I think he is right there at the top of that list. He just blew me away every day we worked together.
DEADLINE: How much of a touchstone musical was the original stage and screen versions of Kiss of the Spider Woman? Many remember that Chita Rivera won one of seven Tonys for the stage version, and Hurt winning Oscar for the Hector Babenco film. There are changes like, the original movie that inspires the plot was actually a Nazi propaganda film, while this feels more like the classic musicals MGM cranked out.
CONDON: Well, first of all, it was a groundbreaking movie in the ’80s. As a younger gay man, I was so grateful for that movie, and that it was one of the first independent movies to cross over in that major way. The musical in the nineties was also groundbreaking, putting not only this relationship front and center, but also the brutality of this dictatorship and torture into a Broadway musical. Both of those things were really important, and I enjoyed both. I first got interested in it as a movie when I was writing Chicago because it did feel to me it was part of this trilogy with Cabaret in Chicago. These Kander & Ebb who live inside their heads and who are really obsessed with certain aspects of show business. But this felt because he was telling the story of a movie, it really could benefit from being a movie. So that was the original instinct. And then I met with Kander and Terrence McNally many years later, and then it took forever to track down the rights and then to be able to sit down and get going.
There are massive differences between this and the other two versions. They explained why it felt important to do a new version. First of all, when we wrote this novel almost 50 years ago. I really, really focused on everything that was in that extraordinary book. But it is, first of all, Molina, and the conversation that he has about his own gender and identification as a woman that just felt very, very current. And that’s something that had not been included in any other version. It also had more than those other versions because of the times in which they were made. There was this sense of a limit to how much a mainstream audience could accept. The relationship between the cellmates was presented as transactional. When they finally do kiss, Valentine is doing it only so that Molina will pass information on. The world has grown in 50 years and that felt like an important thing to explore. And also, one of the big differences in this is that in the novel, he tells seven different stories of the musical. He talks more about a favorite actress than telling the stories of a specific movie. And in this movie, I really created one single MGM musical from 1950 that he is obsessed with, Kiss of the Spider Woman. I think that’s the big challenge with something like this. If you’re going to exist in two worlds where you’ve got the prison story and the Hollywood story, you have to make sure that you don’t resent going back and forth between the two, that each one informs the other and they start to merge and become one.
DEADLINE: Emilia Pérez and Wicked are two musicals that got Best Picture Oscar nominations this week. You’ve written and/or directed musicals from Chicago to Dreamgirls, The Greatest Showman, Beauty and the Beast. What does this portend for the health of the movie musical?
CONDON: The nominations are thrilling. This is a genre I love, and it has been declared DOA about 30 times in history. Remember in the thirties, when sound came in? It was all musicals, and then within three years, no one wanted to see musicals and they were dead, dead, dead. Busby Berkeley was the first revival. What’s exciting about Emilia Perez, and I hope this movie too, is that it is a form keeps reinventing itself. They did it in such a bold, contemporary way. I think the boldness of [Kiss of the Spider Woman] is that it’s going back to the roots of Hollywood history and reinventing that and in a contemporary way. But unfortunately, it’s a genre where you feel that every movie that comes along carries the weight, the burden of the whole genre on its shoulders. If one of them disappoints commercially, suddenly it’s like, oh, that’s gone. That’s over. But there have been movies that haven’t been huge commercially that have really been remarkable in the last few years. Tick, Tick… Boom is one. Really inventive.
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Jon Chu had a big hit with Wicked, but In The Heights is a wonderful movie too. So I think the great thing is that people are still at it and committed to it. I think it’s part of the excitement and anxiety of going to Sundance. For me, the first time there was Gods and Monsters. Again, I’m going with a movie that has no distribution that we made independently, and so we’ll see where that lands. But I’m just so hopeful that there is really significant theatrical distribution for it, a theatrical life in the distribution of this movie. I do think that’s why musicals endure, because they’re great to see in a crowd. They’re great to see in a theater, there’s something communal. There’s something about suddenly people breaking out into applause or like with Wicked, they’re singing along. That really makes a case for why people should go back to the theater.
DEADLINE: It’s Oscar season, and I can’t imagine how many times you and Laurence Mark and Hugh Jackman get the call to return after your first time went so well in 2009. It gets described as the most thankless job, but we are coming up on the Centennial in a couple years. You see yourself and your cohorts throwing yourself into another Academy Awards down the line?
CONDON: It’s funny. We have shied away from it but yeah, I will admit that the three of us have talked about that possibility. It just feels as if the chance to really celebrate 100 years would be pretty remarkable if it happened. But there are people who are doing it very well now, and that’s going to be something that those guys decide. But yeah, it’s an intriguing idea, there’s no question.
DEADLINE: You’ve covered lots of genres over your career. Blockbusters like the Twilight Saga films, musicals, but I saw you also did a Candyman sequel when you needed to work. This is your first trip back to Park City since 1989’s Gods and Monsters, which grounded your career and won you the screenplay Oscar. What did that Sundance experience mean to you?
CONDON: As is the case with a lot of other filmmakers I’ve been reading about this week, Sundance changed my life. There’s no doubt about it. I was working as a journeyman, trying to learn everything I could. And then at a certain point it was like, oh, this is not what I had in mind at all. That’s where I sat back for three years, wrote that script and waited and cast it and waited until we could get it made. And then we brought it there. That was a conscious course correction. I didn’t come to that festival on anybody’s radar as somebody who was capable of that. So we had the most wonderful reception. And out of that came my relationship with Adam Shulman, my agent and now manager, that’s endured for almost 30 years.
DEADLINE: An overnight sensation after years of slogging along?
CONDON: More of a slow burn. We left there without distribution and it took several months. And then Lionsgate, where they just believed in the movie, took it on. No one saw that it would work the way it did. It was at the beginning of a kind of revival of gay movies. So I think that made it seem a little bit more marginal. But again, it is interesting to be reliving that again here, going and premiering something. This movie is the closest in spirit to Gods And Monsters. It’s about Hollywood, and it’s also a gay film. So I don’t know. I suspect it’s going to be a very emotional couple of days.
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