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ince director/writer Bill Condon won an Oscar for his 1998 debut Gods and Monsters, he has become one of Hollywood's top directors and built a diverse body of work that includes the Oscar-winning Dreamgirls, Chicago, Kinsey, The Good Liar and the final two parts of the mega-franchise The Twilight Saga. His latest project is Kiss of the Spider Woman, a musical drama starring Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna and Tonatiuh. Based on the hit stage musical and set in a brutal Argentinian prison in 1983 during the military dictatorship, it tells the story of the unlikely bond between two inmates — political prisoner Valentin (Luna) and the flamboyant homosexual Luis Molina (Tonatiuh). To ward off the daily horrors of their imprisonment, Luis entertains Valentin with stories about his favorite musical from the Golden Age of Hollywood, Kiss of the Spider Woman, as they escape into the elaborate fantasy sequences of the film-within-a-film. Cue Jennifer Lopez in spectacular singing and dance numbers, inspired by the Technicolor musicals of the 1940s. To shoot the film, Condon reunited with his go-to cinematographer Tobias Schliessler, well-known for his beautiful, dramatic photography and gift for shoot- ing complex choreography (their seven collaborations include Beauty and the Beast and Dreamgirls). Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, Condon talks about making the film and his love of post. This project seems perfectly suited to your sensibilities. Was that the appeal? "Yes, and you're so right, but somebody didn't come to me with this. I decided I wanted to do it years ago, and I sat down and wrote it on my own, and I poured so much of myself into the movie, and into the mouths of both Molina and Valentin, but specifically Molina and his attitude toward movies that other people undervalue. That's very much a personal statement from me." Tell us about the visual approach you and your cinematographer Tobias Schliessler took, as it's almost like making two totally different movies – one in the prison, and then the Technicolor fantasy world. "The big challenge underlying it was keeping a consistency to it, and by the end, I think both approaches bleed into the other. So, by the time you get to the emotional climax of the prison love story, Tonatiuh is being lit in a very beautiful, old Hollywood style. And when, in a drug-induced fever dream, the Spider Woman makes her way into his imagi- nation, the grim prison lights suddenly seem more like spotlights. We discussed all that a lot because I was worried that when you cut back and forth between these two stories, an audience can start to resent the interruption. They've just committed to this one story, and then suddenly you're going over there. So, it was to make it as much of a whole as it could be, which is why we didn't overdo the Hollywood pastiche. We were trying to capture the essence of it, but not have quotation marks around it. It needed to have an immediacy, and that meant a slightly-modern thing going on at the same time." Did you do a lot of previs for all the musical and dance sequences, as they had to be really prepped? "They were very much prepped, re- hearsed, and then shot with our iPhones and little cameras sometimes in the rehearsal studio, but we did no literal previs. It was more just shooting them, cutting them and seeing what we had." Tell us about the shoot, which sounds very ambitious. "It was, as we shot in two countries. All the musical numbers were shot first, on stages in New Jersey, in Tony Soprano land. Then we shot the prison scenes and exteriors on-location and on stages in Montevideo, Uruguay. As you said, we made two movies, so the big challenge was shooting a lavish movie musical with 13 numbers in less than four weeks, which meant doing three to four num- bers a week, and that is not what you do on a typical musical film. Usually you do one a week, and then everyone gets to rest and do the other stuff. So, just shooting that many numbers, one on top of the other, and knowing you had to fin- ish them because there was another set waiting for you with another set of danc- ers the next morning was intense. Then, going down to Uruguay and shooting in the prison and on a prison set was also very intense, but the challenges were different. That was more about really tak- ing the time to rehearse with these two wonderful actors on a tiny, cramped set, and maybe an hour of the movie is set there, so for Tobias and me, it was really a question of blocking every moment and scene so that we weren't repetitive, and really finding life within those tight four walls." Where did you do all the post? "We were based in New York, and we did almost all of it there, and then we mixed in Los Angeles." BILL CONDON - KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN CREATING A MUSICAL DRAMA THAT'S A FILM-WITHIN- A-FILM S DIRECTOR'S CHAIR www.postmagazine.com 10 POST SEPT/OCT 2025 BY IAIN BLAIR Musical numbers were shot on stages in New Jersey.