Susan Seidelman IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHN WISNIEWSKI
Susan Seidelman is an American film director, producer, and writer. She first came to notice with Smithereens (1982), the earliest American independent feature to be screened in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
John Wisniewski: How did you become interested in filmmaking?
Susan Seidelman: I’m originally from Philly and went to Drexel University in the early 70s to study fashion design, but soon grew impatient with the program. I was 19 and didn’t have the patience to spend hours sitting behind a sewing machine. As a kid, I’d always loved watching movies, but never thought about actually making one until I took a “Film Appreciation 101” class and had my mind blown. I realized that movies were a combination of all the creative things I loved: storytelling, characters, design, music, fashion. It was the mid 1970s and film schools weren’t nearly as popular, expensive, or competitive as they are now. So I applied to NYU grad film school and somehow got in. There were about 35 people in my class. 30 men and 5 women. As soon as I started to make student films, I was hooked. NYU gave me the tools (the camera equipment, editing facilities, a crew of other students) to be able to start making short films. My second short was nominated for a Student Academy Award and that gave me the confidence I needed to try and make a feature film.
John Wisniewski: Could you tell us about making your film Smithereens? It is now part of The Criterion Collection.
Susan Seidelman: After film school, I stayed in touch with many of the people I had met at NYU and I told them I wanted to make a low budget indie film. This was around 1979. I was living in the East Village at the time and knew the neighborhood well.
It was clear by the end of the 1970s, especially in Lower Manhattan, that things were changing. The old “hippie” culture was giving way to something new. And some rough and tumble music venues started to pop up downtown that attracted artists and musicians as well as their groupies and hangers-on. Clubs like Max’s Kansas City, CBGB’s, and the Mudd Club.
At that time, New York was coming out of a financial crisis. The city was bankrupt, rents were cheap, buildings were abandoned which soon became make-shift performance spaces. There was a general atmosphere of a free-for-all and a feeling that anything was possible. This was a good time for young, struggling creatives because they could afford to live and work in Lower Manhattan. There was a vibrant street culture and an eclectic mix of people – students, artists, misfits, freaks, wannabees. Old neighborhood bars and storefronts were turned into funky galleries and music venues. The walls of the Lower East Side became large canvases for graffiti artists and free advertising space for bands publicizing their shows with Xeroxed fliers.
So I decided to make a film set in the East Village about the various characters I encountered. I also wanted to make a movie with a strong female protagonist. Someone I hadn’t seen portrayed on film before. Although the film wasn’t autobiographical, I certainly identified with the lead character, “Wren”, a feisty young woman who had left the dull suburbs for the excitement of Lower Manhattan. I liked her energy and determination – even if she was manipulative and narcissistic. I hadn’t seen a female character like her in a film before. That was my motivation for making Smithereens. I wanted the film to feel authentic and it helped when I hired punk rock icon Richard Hell as the male lead.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982 and got a strong reception, which came as a great surprise. That turned out to be a big boost to my future career as a film director. As a result, I got an LA agent and started reading scripts that were now being submitted to me. (Although most of them sucked…)
I knew I didn’t want to make a traditional “Hollywood” movie since my heart was still in the NY indie film world. And I knew I wanted to tell stories that had strong female protagonists. So I read a lot of silly studio scripts about babysitters and cheerleaders and just waited until I found a story that grabbed me – something I felt I could put my own stamp on. After a year, I was send the script for Desperately Seeking Susan.
John Wisniewski: How did you meet Madonna and make Desperately Seeking Susan?
Susan Seidelman: Desperately Seeking Susan was written in the early 80s by Leora Barish and was sent to me by the producers Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury after they saw “Smithereens”. As soon as I read it, I loved it and connected with both of the female protagonists. Since the script already had my name in the title (and I’m superstitious), I took this as a sign from the Movie Gods that this was the film I needed to make next. Rosanna Arquette was already attached in the role of “Roberta” when I came onboard. But I was actively involved in the search for the actress to play “Susan.”
I had always loved the 1930's and 40s actresses like Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck, Rosaland Russell, because they were bold, sassy, strong. I wanted to find someone who could play a sexy, mysterious, and slightly naughty, adventuress. I knew about Madonna from living downtown. At the time she happened to live a block from my apartment in Soho. This was the very early days of MTV and I had seen her videos for “Borderline” and “Lucky Star” and thought she had a quality that might be right for the role of “Susan”, despite having limited acting experience at that time. She knew how to flirt with the camera. Anyway, we auditioned her and I was able to convince the Head of Production at Orion Pictures that she would perfect for the role. It was a risk on their part that definitely paid off.
John Wisniewski: How did Desperately Seeking Susan came about?
Susan Seidelman: The film came about because one of the top executives at Orion Pictures, a woman named Barbara Boyle, wanted to make films with, by and about women. She was given permission to green light Desperately Seeking Susan if we could make it for under five million. This was a relatively modest budget for a “studio” movie, but a huge budget for me, compared to the $60,000 budget of Smithereens. Barbara had been a fan of my early film and she liked that Desperately Seeking Susan had two women producers, a woman writer, two women stars, and could be made cheaply on location in NYC. At the time, the studio didn’t have high expectations for the film, but it wasn’t a very big financial investment either – so their risk was relatively low.
Once the budget and cast were approved, Orion pretty much gave us the freedom to make the movie our own way. They had a reputation for giving their directors more freedom than most of the other Hollywood studios. Even though I had never worked with a studio before, I felt relatively confident about directing the film, because I had a clear idea of what the movie should look and who the characters were. I also had great collaborators, like Cinematographer Ed Lachman, Production and Costume Designer Santo Loquasto, and Casting Directors Billy Hopkins and Risa Bramon who introduced me to some great up and coming performers like John Turturro, Laurie Metcalf, Giancarlo Esposito, comedian Steven Wright.
I think the film’s success was all about having the right mix of people, the right story and the right timing. Of course, no one could have predicted at the start of filming that Madonna’s career would skyrocket and within the year she would become a superstar. Or that the film would now be referred to as “The Madonna Movie”, but that certainly helped the film’s success.
John Wisniewski: Could you tell us about making She-Devil with Meryl Streep?
Susan Seidelman: She-Devil was based on a celebrated book by feminist British author Faye Weldon and, like Desperately Seeking Susan, revolved around two women who were total opposites and the impact they have on each other’s lives. Unlike Desperately Seeking Susan, which was a quasi-romantic comedy, She-Devil was a dark revenge-comedy. It dealt with a theme I was interested in, which I think is even more relevant today – our culture’s obsession with wealth, glamour and celebrity. One of the protagonists is an overweight, under-appreciated, powerless housewife (played by Roseanne Barr). The other is a rich, vain and glamourous, “romance novelist” played by Meryl Streep.
Just as the fictional characters were opposites, I wanted that to be reflected in the casting as well. And I couldn’t think of two more seemingly opposite actresses than Roseanne and Meryl. Yet both had strong and distinctive personas so they were a good match.
Also, everyone knew that Meryl was an extremely accomplished and Academy Awarded actress, but up until that time she had done mostly serious roles, many with foreign accents. She had never done a film comedy. I also knew she was extremely intelligent and that it takes a lot of intelligence to pull off comedy. In a drama, the dramatic situation gives the actor something to fall back on. But in a comedy, it’s about acting skill and good timing. Meryl was eager to give it a shot and I think she’s terrific in the part. And the idea of putting a popular television comedian, like Roseanne, in the dramatic role, and a much celebrated dramatic actress, like Meryl, in the comedic role was a twist that appealed to me.
John Wisniewski: Any favorite filmmakers?
Susan Seidelman: I love early Fellini films. Guiletta Masina, the lead actress in Fellini’s 1957 movie Nights of Caberia was an inspiration for the lead character in Smithereens. I also loved the raw and iconoclastic spirit of the French New Wave cinema of the early 1960s and the German cinema of the 1970s. I love the work of director Billy Wilder – his wit and “outsider” social observations. The Apartment and Sunset Boulevard are among my all time favorites. I admire the skill and craftsmanship of Fred Zinnemann and the paranoid 1970s thrillers of Allan Pakula. I’m also inspired by the 1930s and 40s clever screwball comedies of Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch, the films of Jane Campion and Andrea Arnold, as well as the work of Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson and so many others. Basically, I love movies that allow me to enter into a filmmakers’ head. Where I can feel the director’s personal point of view.
John Wisniewski: Thank you, Susan. Any future plans you’d like to share with us?
Susan Seidelman: The movie industry has gone through major changes since I started out. Back then, the studios were making many more films each year, at various budget levels and were willing to take some bold risks. Television (with a few exceptions) was considered a “poor relation” to feature films. Once TV stars were successful they all wanted to make movies. Ironically, today all the big movie stars want to make TV series.
Obviously, things have changed radically. Because of all the new streaming platforms, it’s the TV series that are now taking creative risks and have grabbed people’s attention. Sadly, Hollywood movies have become so expensive (and so few are being made each year) that most are about super heroes, or comic book franchises, sequels, prequels, and sanitized Disney-like family entertainment. Audience’s no longer go to the movies to see “movie stars”. Actors are now hidden behind cartoon costumes or fantasy makeup.
So, like many other directors, I’ve been working on developing a new series and also writing a book – a memoir about what it was like starting out as an aspiring director in the late 1970s, a time when there were so few woman – and trying to break into an industry that was exclusively an All Boys Club.
Finally, I am very happy that Making Mr. Right (starring Ann Magnuson and John Malkovich) has been given new life by Kino Lorber on special edition Blu-Ray after 35 years!