Bill Condon on ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman,’ ‘Dreamgirls,’ ‘Twilight’

As a master of the movie musical, Bill Condon knows a certain truth about theatergoers.

“Secretly, people love it. They love musicals, but they have to be permitted,” says Condon, who has brought to screen such titles as Dreamgirls and Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast.

The writer and director has become one of the go-tos of the musical movie genre, having also written the screenplay for the acclaimed musical Chicago. But his work spans categories, with dramas including Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson and Laura Linney, and the Ian McKellen starrer Gods and Monsters, which won Condon an Oscar for his adapted screenplay. He’s also delved into horror with his early work and in directing the final two Twilight films, to which he brought a winking note of camp.

Next up, Condon tackles Kiss of the Spider Woman, a musical set in an Argentinian prison, where two cellmates distract themselves by recounting the plot of a Hollywood musical. The film stars Jennifer Lopez (the “ideal” diva for the titular role, Condon says), alongside Diego Luna as Valentin, a political prisoner sharing a cell with Molina, a queer window dresser played by newcomer Tonatiuh. 

As with much of his work, this was a passion project for Condon, who had been drawn to the 1976 novel and 1985 film for their trailblazing depictions of queer characters, as well as the Tony Award-winning Kander and Ebb musical. His deep connection to this project was evident on set, according to Luna, and even before filming began, as Condon made sure Luna’s dancing skills were up to par before pairing him with Lopez. 

“It was really nice through the process to find out that in his work, everything has multiple meanings,” Luna notes. “He’s also very generous. He has time to explain and to invite you to that complexity and that kind of multiple-layered story that he’s telling. Few people are so passionate about what they do.”

Jennifer Hudson, who made her Oscar-winning film debut in Dreamgirls, says Condon has been her favorite director to work with because he encouraged her to trust her instincts when it came to embodying her character, while also providing deft guidance on how and when to dial up and down her emotions. “He is like the movie musical king, hands down. If you want your musical to be right, call Bill Condon,” Hudson says.

What made you want to take on Kiss of the Spider Woman?

I don’t think there are that many Broadway shows that should be films. It’s a really, really high bar. I did think Dreamgirls was one of them. And I thought Kiss of the Spider Woman was another, simply because, like Cabaret and Chicago [also by Kander and Ebb], the lead character is someone who has a very difficult day-to-day experience and separates himself from that through a very rich fantasy life connected to show business. I always felt like it was the unmade third leg of that triptych.

The other big thing was, it has taken 50 years for the world to catch up to the novel. The lead character, Molina, says explicitly, “I’m not a homosexual. I have no attraction to homosexual men. I’m a woman, and I like a strong man.” So it’s not trans, but it’s proto-trans. Each of those previous iterations were groundbreaking in their own way, but they had to pull their punches when it came to real issues of gender fluidity and also, frankly, the kiss. So it just felt as if there were huge unexplored aspects of that novel that were worth attacking again.

Did you think about the impact of featuring a proto-trans character in your film now given the political climate?

It was interesting because I wrote it the year before the election, and we shot it in the spring of the election year. So it was very clear already from everything that happened that part of the playbook was going to be demonizing trans people. I think the right has always looked for those cultural issues that get people distracted and worked up. And I guess we moved on from the gays as villains, but I think it was clear that that was going to happen.

How has the early reception to the film been?

There are many so far who connect to it. At the same time, we got pretty dismissive coverage in a few Rupert Murdoch papers. We had basically very, very positive reviews. And it was interesting to see the ones that weren’t, a few of them had that in common.

I think there are many of us who said that this agenda that’s now become clear was underneath the surface of Nixon and Reagan and all those people. And if there’s any silver lining to what’s going on now, it’s that Trump basically ripped the mask off. I don’t think the agenda is that different from what it’s always been. But now, at least it’s clear. And the battle lines are drawn.

So you don’t think most Broadway shows should be turned into movie musicals?

No, no. It’s a very different form. Cabaret set the template for this movie. When Bob Fosse made that into a film, he dropped 60 percent of the score and put all the numbers on the stage because of the realistic nature of the medium. And Rob Marshall had that same idea for Chicago. And then [in Kiss of the Spider Woman], these numbers exist within the movie musical as kind of fever dreams, morphine-induced fantasies.

Now, there’s also another strain of musicals. Wicked is a great example — a very successful musical that does have people break out into song. But I think almost always, you have to really set the table for that carefully. Wicked, for example, lives in a fantasy world, and that helps tremendously. Moulin Rouge!, the way that it heightened reality so much that when they first burst into song, people would giggle, and then they’d be like, “Oh!” Secretly, people love it. They love musicals, but they have to be permitted. They need some permission slip to really give themselves over to it. And I think that’s always something that movie musicals are negotiating.

Do you think the appetite for the genre has improved since the success of films like La La Land and Wicked?

Musicals have been on their deathbed since about 18 months after they arrived with The Jazz Singer. By 1929, there were so many musical movies that people were like, “Enough!” And they would cut numbers out of musicals.

And then in this century, it’s always like there’s a burst with Moulin Rouge! and Chicago, Dreamgirls. Unfortunately, every movie has to carry the burden of the genre on its back, so that when you have three or four movies that don’t work commercially, suddenly it’s like, “No, we don’t want musicals.” And there’s a specific issue these days with the streamers. I talk to friends at Netflix, and one of their most important metrics is retention. And they have found with musicals that when that first number comes along, there’s just a chunk of the audience that moves on. They committed themselves to making musicals a few years ago, and it’s anathema for them now. Some of the biggest financiers have no interest in musicals right now. So I think they’ll always struggle. I thought Beauty and the Beast was such a success in those early Disney adaptations. And Wicked is obviously such a phenomenon. But unfortunately, I think, people always credit that to the IP more than the actual appetite for musicals.

Is that why you went the independent route with Kiss of the Spider Woman?

For a lot of reasons. It was coming back to where I started with Gods and Monsters, just sitting down on my own, no one’s paying me to write the script. [I had] an image of who might be in it, as in Jennifer Lopez, and that she would help us get it financed. You always have to have something if you’re going to devote that amount of time to something that’s so speculative. You also know what’s the upper limit of the budget that you could get for a movie like this. It’s a Tony Award-winning musical, but I would describe it more as a cult musical. And it’s very, very dark. So you can’t do that and be asking for a Dreamgirls-level budget. But what I realized is that if you make it as two movies, the 40 minutes that is the Hollywood musical, and then the 80 minutes that’s in the prison cell, that prison cell movie can be made as a true independent movie. In our case, we went down to Uruguay and shot it there, and it cost one-tenth of what the musical part cost. So the musical part we made in as lavish a way as we would if we had the budget of Beauty and the Beast, but we’re only making really a 40-minute movie, and that’s how we were able to do it.

Do you always have actors in mind when you sit down and write your projects?

Sometimes, yes, sometimes no. There are actors that you fall in love with and love to work with, like Ian McKellen, for me, Laura Linney, people like that who you’re always looking for “How could we play again?” In [Kiss of the Spider Woman,] it’s all about a diva from the golden age of Hollywood. And I don’t think people can fake being a diva. I think diva is a quality, and we don’t have a lot of them who also make movies. And often, the thing that makes them a diva makes them not be able to scale it to the camera and things like that. But we have a handful, and thank God, we have one who was absolutely ideal for this.

Do you then have to address the elephant in the room of celebrity on set when you’re working with someone like Jennifer Lopez?

No, because we were in the bowels of New Jersey. It’s such an intense work environment that all of that goes away, and she doesn’t bring any of it to the work at all.

And same with Beyoncé on Dreamgirls?

Oh God, yes, absolutely. She was 24 when we made that movie but already such a pro, and she had made a number of movies. And Jennifer Hudson was 24, and that was her first movie, first time she’d been on a set. So Beyoncé, in dance stuff, she sort of took over, like, “I’m going to help you.” It wasn’t just her own work ethic but also being very generous. Jennifer [Lopez] was the same way with Tonatiuh and with Diego [Luna].

Could you sense that Dreamgirls would make Jennifer Hudson a star?

I don’t know about those things. I did know, though, that you can get everything right in Dreamgirls, but if you don’t have Effie, you don’t have anything. We really put her through her paces before we even started, but she was just so natural and brilliant. We shot for many months, but we saved “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” for the last couple of days, just because it was, like, that is the mountain to climb. And to have her so inhabit Effie that she could do it. It was just so moving to watch, and Jamie Foxx, he’s fresh off his Oscar for Ray, just sitting there and cheering her on after every take.

Do you usually have people singing live on set or prerecorded?

Both. I do prerecording. And [in Dreamgirls] we did because that was the style of those movies, but then everyone then does sing live along, and we record that and sometimes use bits of that. With Jennifer, we would go back and forth. I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that someone singing live in their throat is necessarily what is ideal for movies. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle.

Did your Oscar win for Gods and Monsters open more doors for you?

I got to write Chicago. That wouldn’t have happened without that. It’s as simple as that, and starting to get other movies made. It doesn’t last forever, by the way. But it did make other things possible, especially since I mostly worked in genre and horror.

You directed the final two installments of the Twilight series, which feels like a bit of an outlier in your filmography. Was it the horror that drew you in?

There were a lot of things about it. I think it started for me with Kristen Stewart. I’d just been fascinated with her right out of the box.

To me, it was also a classic Minnelli Hollywood melodrama. It’s a family story. I aspire to be in the tradition of George Cukor and Vincente Minnelli. But I do think one of the things that’s remarkable about that is that Twilight is a franchise that is really women’s pictures, they call them. It is told from a female perspective. I can’t tell you how many times you talk about that movie and someone would say in the first one, “Well, nothing happens,” but she gets married, she gives birth, she becomes a vampire.

What did you make of the backlash against the films?

Obviously, it became such a target for people, and people felt superior to it, and I thought, “God, you were really missing the point.” Because this is a big franchise that is in on the joke. For me, personally, as a gay director, I thought I brought a bit of camp to it that was permissible. Michael Sheen, that laugh. There’s a line that Molina has in Kiss of the Spider Woman where he says, “Call it kitsch. Call it camp. I don’t care. I love it.” And that’s how I feel about that movie. It’s been a wonderful opportunity to mix it up and to have something where there is such a dedicated audience waiting for it, and you’re in dialogue with that audience knowing that we were going to do this incredibly cruel thing of killing off all of their beloved characters. That, to me, was like, “Oh, I have to,” because I just want to be there the first time we show it. I’ve never, ever heard a scream as loud and last as long as when we cut off Carlisle’s head.

Maybe sometimes I think I was born in the wrong time because I do think of myself as being a kind of Hollywood classicist in a way. In that movie, there was emotion, there was beauty, there was humor and visceral pleasure that I try to have in anything I make. And some of that the pleasure quotient isn’t necessarily at the center of where cinema culture is, so there are going to be people who resent it and detest it, but it becomes a kind of secret badge of honor.

Regardless of genre, you’re often bringing in gay characters and themes to your work.

Yes, even in Beauty and the Beast, for only four seconds. I never claimed it was more. (Laughs.) It’s my sensibility, right? That’s what I’m bringing to it. It’s just who I am. And to come back to even the Twilight thing, I do think despite everything, we still live in a boy culture. And movies are a boy culture. The tastemakers, all of that stuff. So I’ve really enjoyed doing it from a different sensibility. When you watch Kinsey, it’s funny. It’s uncomfortable and funny because I do think there’s a specific gay sensibility and sense of humor that’s different from a more mainstream approach.

As you noted, you spoke about an “exclusively gay moment” for LeFou in the Beauty and the Beast remake that then blew up on the internet. What do you make of all of the noise that surrounded that?

That was such a debacle because it was an offhanded comment in an interview with a gay magazine in London. It was always meant to be a grace note, but suddenly it sounded as if I was pretending to be breaking barriers, and it wasn’t. It was never intended that way. I love the fact that there were countries — I think Russia was one of them — that wouldn’t show the movie because of that. And Disney, to their credit, didn’t cut it anywhere. So that part was good. I just didn’t like the fact that it had been inaccurately presented as some kind of groundbreaking moment, which then disappointed me because it was never intended that way.

What was your intent?

It was just the great inclusivity of a wonderful musical. [In the animated film,] LeFou is a punching bag, he’s not a character, so you turn them into people. And this is like, “Oh, he’s got a kind of masochistic attraction to Gaston. He’s the one Gaston should marry. It’s clear no one else is into him, but he loves him.” So it was there. And it was there because Howard Ashman wrote the original score, and there was a gay sensibility going on there. It was just the completion of a story that started with LeFou pulling Gaston into a hug and saying, “Too much?” and Gaston looking around nervously and saying, “Yeah.”

Do you feel the pressure of the fandom when you’re reviving these classic musicals?

Absolutely. In Dreamgirls, it was a balance. That show was sung-through onstage. It was two hours and 40 minutes. It’s impossible to do in a movie — you need relief. So we had an hour and 45 minutes of that score retained, but there’s a song called “Ain’t No Party,” and people condemn me to this day on chat boards about cutting that. I think many people’s favorite song in Kiss of the Spider Woman is “Dressing Them Up.” It’s not Molina’s “I want” song, but it’s sort of the song that defines him. It’s a beautiful Kander and Ebb song. I tried so hard to figure out how to get it in. He hums it in the movie just as a little Easter egg. But I think there are going to be people who do not forgive the movie for that, and I understand it. And the only thing I’d say to them is if you’re true to the medium you’re working in, and you want to tell this story in that way, you have to throw everything up in the air and, in a way, start over.

So you’ve now taken on two-thirds of the Kander and Ebb triptych with Chicago and Kiss of the Spider Woman. Would you ever approach a movie remake of Cabaret?

God, no. That, to me, is the Mount Olympus of film musicals.

Is there another musical on your wish list?

There are two music-driven movies that I’m about to make. I don’t know which one comes first, but one of them is about Paul Simon and [South African trumpeter] Hugh Masekela, and then another is about George Clinton Jr., with Eddie Murphy playing George. So I don’t know which one comes first, but I’m really excited to be continuing to work in a musical lane.

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