Tonatiuh had been rehearsing Kiss of the Spider Woman for more than a month by the time their costar Jennifer Lopez arrived in New York. Choreographer Sergio Trujillo and director Bill Condon had set aside six hours for her first day, gearing up for an ambitious shoot modeled on lavish, golden age Hollywood musicals. “They were like, ‘This is your mark and then that’s your mark and that’s your mark,’ and she goes, ‘Yeah, okay,’” Tonatiuh recalls. The music started and Lopez hit every mark except for one. She asked the crew to rewind the track before going at it again. “And then she nails it perfectly. I think she finished that entire rehearsal in an hour and a half. I’m like, ‘I’ve been here for a month and a half—and you just killed that?’”
Lopez had been itching to work on a traditional movie musical, and immediately signed on when Condon brought her Kiss of the Spider Woman. It’s no surprise she showed up raring to go. But this is no ordinary musical. In fact, “It’s trying to do something different from anything you’ve seen,” Condon tells me. “This feels like a unicorn movie to me. It’s very hard to actually distill and describe.”
This is partly due to the singularity of Condon’s movie, which has lived in the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s head since he was writing the screenplay for Chicago more than 20 years ago. But it’s also a testament to the vibrancy and elasticity of its source material.
Kiss of the Spider Woman originated as a 1976 novel by Argentinian author Manuel Puig, depicting the dynamic between two cellmates—Luis Molina, a queer outcast imprisoned for “corrupting a minor,” and Valentín Arregui, a political prisoner trying to overthrow the nation’s dictatorial government—who form an unlikely if tenuous bond. To pass the time, Molina describes some of his favorite films for Valentín. Those passages were first realized as mini films in a 1985 movie adaptation, directed by Héctor Babenco and starring William Hurt, Raul Julia, and Sônia Braga—who portrayed the fictional leading ladies of Molina’s cinematic diversions. A few years later, Chita Rivera played those same parts to great acclaim in the Tony-winning 1993 Broadway adaptation of the novel, whose score was written by John Kander, of Cabaret and Chicago fame.
Which brings us back to Condon, a writer-director with credits as varied as the dramatic indie Gods and Monsters, the big-budget musical Dreamgirls, and the final two Twilight movies. His vision for Spider Woman—melding elements of the book and the musical with his own chaotic sensibility—felt like a culmination after decades of making movies in all shapes and sizes. “I did put an awful lot of myself into both characters,” he says. “In the case of Molina, his love of old Hollywood forms, I started to think of it at one point as my explanation for an eclectic career where I have been drawn to different genres—some of which are not the most respectable.”
His varied experiences also taught him how to get this movie made. In an era of great risk-aversion in Hollywood, Condon knew he’d need to mount the project independently. Even so, it all came together remarkably fast. He finished the screenplay in the fall of 2023. Lopez soon signed on, and Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company, Artists Equity, did too. Within about a year, the movie was financed, cast, shot, and edited in time for a world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it premieres Sunday night and hopes to find a buyer.
Condon’s take on the story inserts snippets of a newly devised fictional film that Molina adores—starring his idol, a glamorous star named Aurora (Lopez). Rehearsals kicked off in New York before Tonatiuh, Lopez, and Diego Luna (who plays Valentín) started filming on New Jersey soundstages. The musical shoot was completely separate from the prison shoot, which took place down in Uruguay. “I wrote it as two movies, and we made it as two movies,” Condon says. “That left us the means to make a lavish Hollywood movie musical—because it was only 35 minutes.”