Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna and newcomer Tonatiuh are headlining a new film adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman, based on the 1976 novel of the same name by Argentine author Manuel Puig.
Bill Condon, who in the past has helmed musicals like Chicago and Dreamgirls and dramas such as Gods and Monsters, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn (Parts 1 & 2), and Kinsey, is directing the new version.
A previous film adaptation, directed by Hector Babenco, garnered four Oscar nominations, with actor William Hurt winning the Best Actor Oscar. Bill Condon's version is a direct adaptation of the 1992 stage musical by Terrence McNally, John Kander and Fred Ebb.
On being pulled to the story, Condon says the 1985 film was influential to him as a gay man. He found the movie and the musical versions "groundbreaking", adding that the idea of exploring the political aspects in a musical was important.
In an interview with Deadline, he shares the three versions of the story have "massive differences" and explains the need to do a third version. "First of all, Molina (protagonist), 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 the 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."
