Preparation for the Kiss of the Spider Woman shoot began with four weeks of rehearsal, two in New York and two in Sao Paulo. At first, Babenco was not convinced about Hurt's ability. From the moment he got out of his taxi in New York and saw Hurt, he thought, "This man, too American for my Latin American eyes, a Montana boy could never play this man I love." [Hurt, in fact, was from Washington, D.C., and trained at Juilliard.] Suddenly, after the first page and a half of the read-through, Hurt was like a wounded bird, and tears came to the director's eyes. He was convinced Hurt was up to the task.

Despite accepting Hurt in the role after the read-through, Babenco agonized all through rehearsals over how the heterosexual actor would ever find the gay character in himself. To help Hurt tackle the part, and because author Manuel Puig was not available, Babenco put him with Patricio Bisso, who was set to play the small role of Molina's friend Greta and design the film's costumes. Bisso is gay, had been in jail himself, and was close to his mother, like Molina in many ways. Hurt toured Sao Paulo with him, often visiting gay cinemas, looking for clues to the character. Bisso got fed up translating the films for him and started making up the stories instead. Bisso later said Hurt used him as a "sacrificial lamb" for his process, playing cat and mouse games with him to get a sense of how Molina would react in similar circumstances. During one such session, Hurt took Bisso to a nice restaurant, but Bisso couldn't eat because Hurt's prodding and game-playing had made him cry.

Raul Julia lost weight for the role. Babenco arranged for both actors to meet people who had been victims of political torture, but Hurt decided at the last minute not to go and waited to hear what his co-star thought.

Tensions started early on in the process between Hurt and 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.

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." The two men would work all hours, even coming in on Sundays. Later in the process, they went to the studio where the jail set was being constructed. According to Hurt, the crew stayed out of sight and just watched the actors rehearse for four hours, visibly touched that they put so much effort and passion into their work. "I don't know two men who got into each other's souls as thoroughly as these two guys," Weisman said.

Hurt and Julia switched roles for a day to get insight from each other about what the other needed. Hurt suggested to Babenco they make the switch permanent. Weisman warned the director not to agree, that Hurt was just suggesting it to see if Babenco still had confidence in him. Hurt says he never meant to make the switch and that it was only his way of letting Babenco know he was dissatisfied with what they had done to that point and to "light a fire" under him. In any case, Babenco refused the idea.

On a visit to the star's dressing room, Babenco found Hurt in full make-up and costume, trying to get at the gist of the character. Babenco told him he had the body of a boxer and to use that to imagine himself as someone with his physique who wanted to be a very elegant dancer. The director told the "freaked out" star that when he understood the character from that contradiction, "then we'll talk about the ponytail, pancake, beauty mark," and the rest of the outward appearances.

To push Hurt to find his feminine side, and also to loosen up his body and make him more flexible and fluid, Babenco had him work with choreographer Mara Borba, who was set to play the Spider Woman. William Hurt: "She was the core of Molina; she helped me find him in my body." Hurt would walk behind her down the street, watching and analyzing her movements. Borba helped him throughout shooting as well, especially when he had trouble finding the right lightness. At one point, she suggested he take a scarf down from the wall and use it "to make believe your head is like a full moon floating high above the clouds."

Borba also became the bridge between Hurt and Braga, who at a certain point in the production was asked to play Leni Lamaison in the Nazi film in addition to Valentin's girlfriend. Since Braga never went to the prison set to watch Hurt work as Molina, Borba would observe all his gestures and movements and bring them back to Braga when the film-within-the-film scenes were shot later so she could replicate them.

Manuel Puig came to Sao Paulo to work with Leonard Schrader on the script of Kiss of the Spider Woman. He put a lot of humor back into the story and came up with the idea for how Molina would first be introduced to the audience, wrapping a towel around his head while he related the Nazi film story to Valentin.

Just days before principal photography began on the movie, Hurt told Babenco, "You've been very patient, and I have a surprise for you." On the first day of shooting, there was Molina, just as the director had hoped.

Principal photography took place between October 1983 and March 1984. The schedule was initially set for 60 days, but interiors took so much longer to shoot than planned, it ended up taking more than 100 days.

The jail cell interiors were filmed at Vera Cruz Studios outside Sao Paulo. The walls of the cell were constructed to be raised and lowered to facilitate tracking, crane, and dolly shots.

The cell block scenes were filmed in a prison that had been shut down. Scenes outside the prison were filmed on location in Sao Paulo.

The filmmakers originally planned to use Cat People (1942) as one of the films Molina describes, just as the character does in the novel, but they had trouble with Universal over the rights, forcing rewrites after shooting began to construct the fictional Nazi film. There were constant revisions from Schrader and 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.

The main conflicts on the set grew between Hurt and Babenco. Their relationship steadily deteriorated to the point where they didn't even speak to each other any more. Assistant Director Amilcar Claro became the go-between, since he spoke both English and Brazilian Portuguese. Claro said the tension was terrible but actually good for the film because it helped Hurt with his performance. "There are still stories around Brazil about how hard William Hurt was to work with," Claro noted years later. "That's not true. He's a marvelously sensitive actor, and he never engaged in any movie star behavior."

Despite all the problems during the shooting of Kiss of the Spider Woman, according to Claro, Hurt earned such respect and affection from the crew that they all accompanied him to the airport when his part in the shooting was done to bid him farewell. "He [won them over] with his personality and integrity, his sincerity and commitment to his work," Claro said.

Cinematographer Rodolfo Sanchez: "I never worked with a film crew that became so emotionally involved in a project."

"One thing you could never accuse Hector Babenco of was a lack of passion," noted the production's attorney, Peter Dekom, who worked on spec for three years never knowing if Kiss of the Spider Woman would even get made. "He's somewhere between a hustler, a salesman, a teddy bear, and a visionary." Patricio Bisso added that the director "was like a tightrope walker without a net."

With the main story in the can, it was time to start on the film-within-a-film sequences. 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 Sao Paulo.

Patricio Bisso was a drag performer and actor without much experience as a film costume designer, but Babenco took a gamble on him anyway and was pleased with the results. Molina's fantasies came alive from Bisso's detailed drawings.

Babenco by this point had asked Braga to play Leni Lamaison in the Nazi film. "I cannot sing, I cannot sing in French," she recalled of her nervousness about doing the role. "It was like, to some people who were there [on set], a torture."

Puig helped Braga find the soul of Leni, playing the entire part for her, demonstrating the movements of a 1940s film diva. He told her to move through the nightclub with both hands on one hip "and think of liver trouble."

The Nazi film shoot was completed the last day of February 1984.

Choreographer Mara Borba was originally set to play the Spider Woman. (Shots exist of her in costume.) At the last minute, 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.

With many hours of footage in the can, Weisman became worried about Babenco's ability to handle the edit since his English was still not very good, so he stepped in to oversee post-production. By the time principal photography wrapped, Weisman had culled through the footage and reduced the usable takes to three hours of film.

The budget was almost entirely used on shooting and there wasn't much left for post. In addition, the producers had only planned on two months to complete the work, but editing in fact went on almost a year in a dismal little cement block building in Los Angeles. The most difficult task was figuring out how to integrate the fantasy film segments into the main story.

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 (1985), to act as go-between.

In July 1984, Babenco went back to Sao Paulo to supervise work on the score. While there, he discovered he had non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and had to begin a long treatment process. Weisman continued editing in California.

Initial screenings of Kiss of the Spider Woman did not go well. Raul Julia was furious after watching the first cut: "What happened to the movie? What happened to all our great work?!" After seven months of post-production, Spider Woman was sent to the New York Film Festival. The selection committee rejected it without even watching the whole movie. William Hurt wasn't too concerned about this until he saw the first cut himself and realized why they dismissed it so abruptly. The fantasy film sequences were too long and overwhelmed the story of the relationship between the two men. He wanted to buy the print and burn it so it would never be released.

Weisman drove the footage across country to New York to re-cut it and work on sound. There was no insurance and no back-up footage. If something had happened on the road, the film might have been lost.

Hurt and Julia spent five weeks in post-production dubbing Kiss of the Spider Woman. This gave Schrader the chance to rewrite most of the off-screen dialogue for the actors to record, giving the film a totally different feel and bringing the original intentions back into focus. After 14 months of post-production, the film was finished.

Even with the reworking, Kiss of the Spider Woman was rejected by distributors everywhere. The producers submitted it to the Cannes Film Festival. It was selected on one condition, that more editing be done to tighten up the ending. The re-cutting was done on the run, and the finished product barely made it back to Cannes in time for a screening. In fact, Weisman delivered it with the sound on separate magnetic tracks because there was no time to make a composite print.

by Rob Nixon