Trivia / Kiss of the Spider Woman

• Cast the Runner-Up: During rehearsals, Raúl Juliá and William Hurt had trouble finding the chemistry they needed for their scenes together. To better understand what each needed from the other's role, Hurt suggested they try an experiment where they would switch roles, with Hurt as Valentin and Julia as Molina. The role-switching rehearsal went so well that Hurt initially suggested to director Héctor Babenco that they should switch parts for the film as well. Obviously, the switch did not occur, but Hurt states that it was a very useful experiment in helping them more fully understand their own characters.
• California Doubling: São Paulo plays both itself and World War II-era Paris. It's surprisingly convincing.
• Doing It for the Art: Reportedly, William Hurt and Raúl Juliá worked for nothing but the payment for their air tickets and hotel bills in Brazil, where the film was shot.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Raúl Juliá lost weight for his role.
• Fake Nationality:
  • William Hurt (Irish-American) and Raúl Juliá (Puerto Rican) play Brazilians.
  • In the "film-within-a-film", all the French and German characters played by Brazilian actors.
• Faux Fluency: Sônia Braga didn't speak English at the time, and learned all her lines phonetically.
• Hostility on the Set:
  • Tensions started early on in the process between William Hurt and Hector Babenco. David Weisman later remarked that Hurt had a wonderful mastery of language and spoke in "great metaphorical ellipses that are hard to follow even if English is your native language." For Babenco it was impossible. He became frustrated by Hurt talking "for hours" and learned to just nod and pretend to agree in order to keep the conversations relatively short. Their relationship steadily deteriorated to the point where they didn't even speak to each other any more. Assistant Director Amilcar Monteiro Claro and actor Milton Gonçalves became the go-between, since they were bilingual. Claro said the tension was terrible but actually good for the film because it helped Hurt with his performance.
  • By his own admission, Hurt was already gaining a reputation for being difficult. He often pushed too hard and was not always diplomatic, but said, "Raul never saw any of the pushing I did as being offensive."
  • Weisman and Babenco fought constantly during editing, sometimes to the point of physical confrontations, making things very difficult for the people cutting the picture. Leonard Schrader had to come back from Tokyo, where he was working on his brother Paul's film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, to act as go-between.
• The Other Marty: Choreographer Mara Borba was originally set to play the Spider Woman. (Shots exist of her in costume.) At the last minute, Sônia Braga suggested that she play the part since it would cause confusion for the audience to see her as Valentin's girlfriend and Leni Lamaison but not the third female. She called Borba first with the idea before taking it to Babenco. Borba said she was sad at first to lose the part but realized Braga was right and that playing the part was much less important than her true role in the film, which was her collaboration with William Hurt.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Burt Lancaster was originally offered the lead role of Luis Molina.
  • The filmmakers originally planned to use Cat People as one of the films Molina describes, just as he does in the novel, but they had trouble with Universal over the rights, forcing rewrites after shooting began to construct the fictional Nazi film.
  • The producers were counting on a co-production deal with Gaumont to shoot the Nazi movie in Paris, but the French studio backed out at the last minute. This necessitated a lot of scrambling and re-budgeting to do the work in Buenos Aires, which has the most European feel of any South American city. But they couldn't even afford that, so they decided to use downtown São Paulo.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: There were constant revisions from Leonard Schrader and Manuel Puig throughout every day. William Hurt began to complain that he felt like he was working on a television Soap Opera, and tensions on set began to rise.

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