Bill Condon credits Jennifer Lopez for getting Kiss of the Spider Woman made

Bill Condon says Jennifer Lopez enabled Kiss of the Spider Woman to be made.

The musical movie is set to be released in cinemas in October and the director felt that J.Lo was the ideal person to play the titular "diva".

Bill told The Hollywood Reporter: "Jennifer Lopez is the reason this movie got made. There's only one person who could play this diva. We don't have that many divas. I can count them on one hand. And then how many of them are great dancers, singers and Latin? I think there's only one.

"She handed our producer the Golden Globe for Dreamgirls, and I met her that night. She was talking about how much she wanted to make musicals. So, I just had this faith that this would speak to her."

The Gods and Monsters filmmaker was particularly impressed at how Lopez, 56, mastered a number that the crew only had a single day to shoot towards the end of production.

Condon recalled: "There is this number called Give Me Love, and we only had one day to shoot it – it was right toward the end. We made it but there was a little sense of, 'God, are we running on fumes now?'

"It's an elaborate number – she comes into the club, starts dancing, goes to the first tableau, goes onto the bar, jumps off the bar onto the floor and runs. Jennifer did it all in one take and when we got that first take, it was like, 'Oh my god, we have it.'"

The 69-year-old filmmaker revealed that he was in awe of Lopez's work ethic on set.

He said: "Jennifer shot in a little under four weeks, and then she was done. It was crazy. In any typical musical, you shoot over 12 weeks, and you do at most one number a week. She's doing one number every day, practically."

Bill explained that he felt it was necessary to make his version of Kiss of the Spider Woman – which was previously adapted for the big screen in 1985 for a picture starring the late William Hurt – as an independent film.

The director said: "I knew the only way to make it, the way it needed to be made, was independently. It's never been as mainstream as those other two Kander and Ebb musicals (Cabaret and Chicago). It is the darkest of them, in a way, and it is set in a prison. There is brutality in it.

"The idea I had was: It is two movies. It's the prison, which is the movie we ultimately made in Uruguay for 10 per cent of the entire budget. Then there are the musical numbers, but the thing that makes it doable is that that's 35 minutes of the movie.

"So you weren't making a two-hour musical, you're making a 35-minute musical. There were no cut corners there, there was just less of it."