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Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate release Kiss of the Spider Woman nationwide on October 10th, 2025. NYC MOVIE GURU: Between entertaining the audience and provoking emotionally, which of those two aspect was most challenging to tweak in the editing room? Bill Condon: Provoking an audience emotionally is the deeper emotional connection which comes first. If the characters don't get under your skin in some way and if you don't care about them, then the entertainment is fine, but it doesn't matter, in a way. NYC MOVIE GURU: What was the process like to incorporate comic relief in Kiss of the Spider Woman? BC: I think it's crucial. That's what life is like in the darkest of times. I'm a firm believer in gallows humor and in real life, too. People always talk about the disparity between the splashy Hollywood musical and the gritty prison drama, but I always thought of them as being a little closer than that. I think that the drama itself is kind of like a play. It had been turned into a play by Puig himself, but it's 2 wonderfully vivid characters written by Manuel Puig connected to each other in this one tight space. So, as in any human connection, humor is a part of it. I was able to put a lot of my own thoughts, as Luis says, "The people I pity are the ones who don't like musicals." I got to have a conversation with an imaginary person in the form of Valentin who resists what I think is one of the best movie genres. NYC MOVIE GURU: What does the term "cinematic" mean to you? BC: It's not a simple, easy answer. The movies that I was drawn to at an early age were not only musicals, but also Hitchcock. They were horror movies. Horror movies depend a lot on music and on the movement of the camera. I think it's important to have great characters and good dialogue, but then to heighten it with what music brings to something. In musicals, people get to sing their subtext. They get to tell you how they're feeling. Then you add everything visual to tell the story. I referenced a lot in Kiss of the Spider Woman to Vincente Minnelli who tell a psychological story just through color and camera movement. So, I think that "cinematic" at its utmost is when you do all of that. Some people make a distinction between things that are visual and things that are talky; I think that talky movies can be extremely cinematic. Movies that are just treading on visuals all of the time can be not cinematic and sometimes be inert. I think it's about having as full a meal as you can get out of a movie. NYC MOVIE GURU: I believe that each film is like a garden of emotions where each flower is a different emotion. Which flower or emotion was most challenging to cultivate in Kiss of the Spider Woman? BC: I think that that's a great way to describe it. The flower that I'm always a little resistant to is the flower of self-pity. It's often expressed by people through tears---that old adage, "The audience should cry; the performer shouldn't." I'm a firm believer in that. You've really got to earn that moment and make sure that it's more than just self-regard. In terms of the flowers in Kiss of the Spider Woman, and this is where I had great collaborators and I'd give a special shout-out to Diego Luna, the flower of love: taking Valentin from where he starts at the beginning of the movie and to invest in and believe in his journey toward not only acceptable of Luis, but actually falling in love with him. That was the challenge of the movie, and it couldn't have happened without having Diego Luna plotting it out next to me and really exploring, right from the beginning, how we can lay in little aspects---tiny little buds---that then would lead to this feeling of love at the end. NYC MOVIE GURU: Would it be fair to say that there's poetry in Kiss of the Spider Woman? BC: There is literal poetry here in Fred Ebb's lyrics. There's a song called "Where You Are." How do you navigate a very difficult situation and not fall into despair? Here's a lyric: "The pistol shot can't kill if you unload the gun." If people could, very happily, type that out and put it on their wall and look at it every day, I think we'd have a better world. NYC MOVIE GURU: At what point does visual style become substance? BC: In good movies, the style is the substance. I talked about Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor---people working in that system who really thought of every shot as telling a story about character. Here, it's not only about the disparity between the two worlds, but also about the journey as they move toward each other the same way that the characters move toward each other. If you knew the movie well enough, you could turn off the soundtrack and watch the way that the images in the prison change, and understand that these two people are being affected by each other. By the time that Luis completely exposes himself and he and Valentin make love, there's a romantic hue to the prison cell suddenly. This place that's so grim and grey at the beginning is a place, if you approach it correctly, that love can bloom. NYC MOVIE GURU: How did you come up with the stylish design of Kiss of the Spider Woman title card ? BC: As an 11-year-old, I was obsessed with Bonnie and Clyde which has these great titles. It's the same thing, frankly. Warren Beatty comes in and then the red comes in which represents blood and death. Teddy Blanks designed our titles. It was so much fun to work on so many different things. At the end, we literally recreated the title design of a 1950 Hollywood musical which was a blast. NYC MOVIE GURU: How did you decide what to leave to the audience's imagination, especially when not showing the prison torture? BC: I think that it's always more powerful if you don't see it. You're hearing them. This horrible place, the prison, is like an organism where horrible, unthinkable things are happening. Every time something really bad bit of torture involving electricity happens, the whole place hums. So you're constantly aware of the danger that you're living within. It always feels more potent to stay with the reaction of somebody than to actually see something. NYC MOVIE GURU: How do you define and detect charisma in an actor or actress? BC: It wasn't too hard to imagine that Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez would have charisma; it was about Tonatiuh. We had many, many auditions for Luis. He sent in a tape. Watching that, as I director, I was drawn to his eyes and face and how expressive it is and how much I'm feeling. That was there in that very rough tape. We loved so many actors who were so great, especially on the stage, it's just the cruelty of life that, somehow, the plains of their face and eyes makes it harder for them to express everything on screen. NYC MOVIE GURU: What was the process like to know how to incorporate the right amount of exposition and how to incorporate it? BC: There is exposition about the movie within the movie. I feel grateful for it because you probably don't want to see all two hours of that movie, probably. You're getting the best bits of it. Other than that, you try hard to do that as a writer. In this case, there's the luxury of spending several weeks, before we shot the prison part of the movie, rehearsing it. When you rehearse with two wonderful actors who are smart, you really start to hone, cut, change and make sure that everything, as much as possible, becomes behavioral. NYC MOVIE GURU: Who are some actors and actresses from the Golden Age of American Cinema that you can imagine in the roles in Kiss of the Spider Woman? BC: Wow! That's a cool idea! Ginger Rogers would've been Aurora. I could see her doing that role perfectly. I'm not sure that she would've made a great Spider Woman, though. That's the remarkable thing about Jennifer Lopez: she could do all three roles of Ingrid, Aurora and Spider Woman. Armando would be somewhere between Gene Kelly and Ricardo Montalban. The elegant sidekick--we referenced Danny Kaye in the movie---he's a pretty good template for what's going on here. Unfortunately, latino actors in the 1940s were never given the opportunity to play characters as complicated as Luis and Valentin in the prison scenes. I'm sure there were good actors and stage actors, and that in Spanish and Mexican cinema, there were actors that I don't know about. But if you go to the American part of it, I'm not sure. 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