SOURCE: “Manuel Puig Dreams in Technicolor,” in American Film, Vol. 10, No. 1, October, 1984, pp. 70-1.

In the following interview, Puig discusses how he began his career in the film industry before becoming a novelist.

Night after night, in a Buenos Aires penitentiary, Molina, a thirty-seven-year-old homosexual window dresser, re-creates movie magic for his Marxist cellmate, Valentin. Molina's inimitable way of spinning out melodrama—with loving attention to all the details of sets and costumes, the characteristics of the stars, and the convolutions of the plot—reflects the lifelong obsession of Manuel Puig, the distinguished Argentinean novelist whose original ambition was to be a movie director.

In the novel, Kiss of the Spider Woman, the first of Molina's plots is drawn from the original Cat People. The German film plot is invented. The one about a maid and an aviator is from Enchanted Cottage, a 1945 fantasy starring Dorothy McGuire. The...