Since 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 shooting 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 imagination, 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, rehearsed, 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 numbers 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 finish them because there was another set waiting for you with another set of dancers 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 taking 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.”
Tell us about the editing process with Brian Kates. Did he come on-set at all?
“He didn’t come to Uruguay, but he did visit the set a few times in New Jersey, although once he saw where we were, he wasn’t racing to come back. But we were in constant touch, and he would send things every day, and I would get to have a little conversation with him, so we were working during the whole thing, and then on weekends, he’d come in and have a session where we could really go through things.”
What were the main editing challenges?
“After shooting the musical numbers, we were able to shoot the prison movie in order, which was a great luxury, especially for the actors. So, the first test came after shooting a week’s worth of prison scenes and having Brian put it together with the first Hollywood scenes to see if that was going to work, and luckily it felt like it did from the start, so that was a relief. But then, later, you discover things when you first put it in front of an audience. The first cut was about 15 minutes longer, and you discover that it’s overstaying its welcome, that the story’s been told, and there are scenes I love, which we didn’t need. Originally, there was more stuff happening at the beginning of the film that I think made it a little hard to focus, and so we had to get back to the simplest idea — one guy shows up in the other guy’s cell, and the drama begins, and so anything before that turned out to be superfluous. It’s one of those things that seems obvious in retrospect, especially for someone who wrote the script, but somehow you must go through that other thing to get there, and that’s why I love the whole post process, and why editing is one of my favorite things. It’s where making the film really all happens.”
What was the trickiest scene to cut?
“There’s a point about two-thirds of the way into the movie when Valentin is finally opening up to Molina, and there’s this unofficial rule in musicals, that you should have another number coming every eight or 10 minutes. And we follow that rule until this chunk, where we have a 17-minute stretch that is mostly just the drama of what’s happening between these two men, including some long dialogue scenes. Sometimes we’d cut it too tight, and we’d lose the sense of those breaths that are so important, so we’d put those back, but then it’d be too much put back, and you had to hold the audience for those scenes. So, to me, it was gratifying when we showed the movie to the first two test audiences and you really couldn’t hear a pin drop during that long sequence. It was the thing I was most worried about, and it was the trickiest.”
Do you find test screenings helpful?
“I do. I have a typical home projector system and I had friends over every weekend, as did Brian, and I would show groups of two or three or four people the movie, before we did an official test, and it is that mysterious thing — you share it with people, and it alters the movie. It alters your own perception of the movie, so I did a lot of that.”
Talk about how important sound is to you, and what was involved?
“Nothing’s more important in a musical than getting the music and sound right, and the thing you’re always chasing is that sense of the electricity of a live performance. I think that there’s something deadening in a movie musical when it feels too perfect and processed, and it doesn’t have that ‘oomph’ of where you can just feel the musicians, and that was always our goal. We did a first mix in New York, and then we went to LA, where our mixer, Jon Taylor, has his own studio at home. Then we finished up at Universal, and I think we reached our goal in the final mix in LA.”
It’s obviously not a huge visual effects movie, but there are some, right?
“Quite a lot, and Phosphene did them all. The big challenge was to complete all the sets that we built on these sound stages in New Jersey, but in the style of a movie from the 1950s, so they were not creating photoreal skies and mountains and stuff like that, but instead they were creating the occasional painted backdrops, as they would have used back then, or some kind of vintage-feeling process shot for scenes in cars and things like that. So, it was really using cutting edge VFX to go back to the past, and the crucial thing was that it all had to feel analog, and not digital.”
The film looks so visually beautiful. Did you massage it a lot in the DI?
“Yes, because late in post we totally flipped our idea about the look we’d decided on when we were shooting, and even in the way that the dailies were processed. That idea was that the film-within-the-film, the Hollywood musical, would have some grain, and a slightly softened image that reflected the lenses of the time, while the prison would, by contrast, be this super clear image. But I suddenly thought, it’s not literally the movie, it’s actually Molina describing the movie in his head. So, what if we make it look like the ultimate 4K Blu-ray restoration of this musical, so vivid and clear that you see every bead on the gold dress when Jennifer arrives at the ball? And then, instead, we add the grit and grain to the prison movie? And we tried it, and it worked so much better, even though it was the opposite of what we were intending to do in the DI with Tobias and our longtime colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3. So, I’m very happy with the way it turned out.”