Susan Seidelman in Conversation with Willow Catelyn Maclay
BY
WILLOW CATELYN MACLAY
An intimate conversation with the trailblazing American filmmaker.
Susan Seidelman joins Metrograph for a Q&A following a Members Only screening of Desperately Seeking Susan on Wednesday, June 26.
Susan Seidelman’s newly published Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir about Movies, Mothers and Material Girls begins with a quote from feminist author Rita Mae Brown: “The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.” Born in 1952, Seidelman grew up in suburban Pennsylvania, and knew there had to be something more. She has chased this idea throughout her career, navigating the ever-changing tides of the film industry and the place women hold within it. Films of hers, such as Smithereens (1982), Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) and She-Devil (1989), often bridge the gap between the extraordinary and the ordinary, following women whose fantasy versions of themselves are at odds with the reality of their existence. In this respect, Seidelman’s ever-innovative career functions as a four-decade-long thesis on the inherently feminine persona-swap motif, told through the populist lens of a deeply fun and darkly comic sensibility. I caught up with Seidelman over Zoom where we talked about how this motif drives many of her films, and the experiences that inspired her to become a director in the wake of second-wave feminism. —Willow Catelyn Maclay
Smithereens (1982)
WILLOW CATELYN MACLAY: In many of your films, such as your student short Yours Truly, Andrea G. Stern (1979), you focus on the idea of how girls become women, which is something that comes up frequently in your lovely new memoir, too. Has this always been a key concern for you?
SUSAN SEIDELMAN: In high school, I didn’t even know what feminism was. I didn’t think in those terms, even though it was the end of the ’60s and there were a lot of changes going on, in Berkeley and in other cities. In my town, 1969 was very much like 1953. Girls grew up thinking that they would get married and live the same kind of lifestyle as their mothers. When I hit college, suddenly the world changed—because of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and feminism, which hit me in a very direct way. I started thinking about the expectations I’d had as a girl, and asking myself, “Did I want to lead the same life as my mother?” She had a lovely life, but I realized it wasn’t right for me. When I went to NYU, I wanted to make movies about things that were personal, things that were important to me, that were on my mind at the time: how women’s lives were changing, how women were getting out into the workplace, how they were starting to question the values and the lifestyle they’d thought they were going to have. Because so few women were making movies, those topics weren’t being dealt with frequently. The few movies about women going through these changes, like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) or An Unmarried Woman (1978), were directed by men. It was important to me to be a woman director who was telling women’s stories.
WCM: You entered film school in 1973, around the same time that your mom went back to college. Do you think seeing her do that helped you to take the risks associated with being a woman director in the ’70s and ’80s?
SS: I was entering my adult life so I could shape it in any direction I wanted, but she became a great example of somebody who already had a life but wanted something more. She had grown-up kids, and she was questioning—not rebelling, but saying, “I can be more than who I was,” and she was fearless about it.
WCM: Your Academy Award-nominated short And You Act Like One Too (1976) captures the desire of its protagonist, Marsha, to break free from her daily life, which she does by spending a day with a hitchhiker. It reminded me of something that Chantal Akerman said: “I made Jeanne Dielman to give all these actions [by women] which are typically devalued a life on film.” Were you driven by a similar impulse?
SS: Absolutely. In all my films, not just the early ones, there’s a through line of women exploring their fantasies, desires, or dissatisfactions. I wanted to create a language to capture that world—sometimes, like in the case of And You Act Like One Too, the films are more realistic. Later, I pushed it in other directions. Certainly, Desperately Seeking Susan explores that theme with a fantasy spin. It uses more cinematic elements, but keeps the emotions real. The goal was to allow the characters to enter another reality, or to push reality a little, while always making sure the core of what I was talking about was real.
On the set of Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
WCM: With Smithereens (1982), you find a middle ground: gritty realism, traipsing about downtown NYC, using a 16mm camera, mixed with the fantasies of the protagonist Wren—an intoxicating mix that led the film to be the earliest American indie feature to compete for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In your memoir, you describe envisaging Smithereens as a commentary on the complex male characters of the ’70s, to prove a woman could inhabit a character just as dynamic.
SS: I wanted to create female characters who had flaws and strengths just like the male characters I’d fallen in love with, like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967). The only place I saw those kinds of female characters was once I went to film school and started catching up on European cinema—Anna Karina in Godard’s movies, to name one example, and Lina Wertmüller’s films from the ’70s. Of course, I also loved Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957); Giulietta Messina’s performance was a huge influence on the character of Wren.
With Smithereens, and with Desperately Seeking Susan, I also wanted to embrace the feminine in a way that felt proud of being filled with this feeling. They were called “chick flicks,” which was a pejorative way of saying they’re girly, of writing off a lot of women artists who were talking about their lives and experiences. Thankfully, things started to change in the ’90s as indie cinema evolved.
WCM: I want to talk about the form of Smithereens. The length and the choice of shots is very deliberate. For example, frequently, the camera holds on Wren a little longer after a conversation naturally ends.
SS: In terms of the subjective camera, it was to bring you into her world and her headspace; when you hold on somebody, instantly the viewer is drawn into their inner life. I was telling this story through Wren’s eyes and through her energy—because she’s a character who is always on the go. That was important to capture. There are lots of shots done with a moving camera of her feet walking with her shopping bags, accompanied by the Feelies soundtrack, which has this on-the-move crazy energy to it. She’s constantly glomming on to one person after another, trying to figure out where to live, how to live, who she wants to be, and trying to tell people that she exists, taking selfies, before there was that word, selfie, using a Xerox machine. It’s her way of saying, “I’m here, you better pay attention to me.”
WCM: You wrote in your memoir that every opportunity is a chance to hone your craft, everything is a learning experience, you never know what’s around the corner—and after Smithereens brought you to the attention of Hollywood, that turned out to be casting a pre-fame Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, which is a perfect storm of feminine playfulness, desire, and fantasy. You wrote that it was inspired by Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), and both films indulge in the fantasy of personality dress-up. At the same time, Madonna became a major pop star in the middle of shooting; suddenly all these young girls were dressing up like her.
SS: I saw Celine and Julie Go Boating at the New York Film Festival. It turned out Leora Barish, the screenwriter, had also seen it and was also inspired. I was not the first director they went to for Desperately Seeking Susan—Jonathan Demme, maybe Louis Malle. Smithereens hadn’t come out yet, so they were lucky to find me, and I them. Again, a lot of success is about luck and timing. I didn’t know Madonna would become a superstar, I just liked her. She lived down the street. I thought she was cool. Similarly, things had come together in the right way for Smithereens with Richard Hell, a punk rock musician who wasn’t really an actor, but I was able to bring out what I found interesting about him in real life and overlay that onto the character he played. I had hoped I could do the same with Madonna, with no idea of the trajectory her career would take.
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
I was always trying to have my finger on the pulse, but you never know what’s going to pass the test of time. I had no idea there would be Madonna wannabes, that every woman and gay man in the world would become infatuated with her, but I found her compelling. I also knew that idea of transformation or reinvention was something that stemmed from being this slightly restless suburban girl who looked around and said, “There’s got to be another person I can be, and I have got to find that other world that I can live in.” I think a lot of women have this other person living inside of them they want to let out. In the script, the idea of Roberta [Rosanna Arquette, in her first lead role] getting conked on the head and waking up with amnesia was a device to explore becoming another person. I’ve always been desperately seeking some other way to live.
I think many people have a fantasy about other characters—the more glamorous, more exciting, more extraordinary versions of who they could be. There’s part of me that’s just ordinary, but I see the bad girl part of myself in Wren, the good girl part of myself in Roberta. That dichotomy of two women who are opposites is in many of my films—also A Cooler Climate (1999), too. I find myself trying to merge the two characters to come up with the best version of each, or somehow they influence each other in a way that makes them both a little better by the end.
WCM: You frequently cite old Hollywood screwball comedies as a point of inspiration, both for their plots and the performances—you had Madonna watch Barbara Stanwyck films to prepare for Desperately Seeking Susan, and to Ann Magnuson you pointed out actresses like Rosalind Russell and Eve Arden for your prescient sci-fi romantic comedy Making Mr. Right (1987).
SS: I love screwball comedy, because the characters are stylish and sexy, but also frazzled. The women aren’t afraid to be combative or speak their mind with the leading man. If you look at The Lady Eve (1941), Stanwyck’s character is a hustler, she isn’t a goody-goody—again, I love that fearless quality. I’ve always gravitated towards smart, sassy women living messy lives. That’s what I tried to do with Ann Magnuson’s character in Making Mr. Right. Her professional life is pretty together in many ways, but her personal life is a mess. You can see it in her wardrobe, in her home, and the way she relates to the men in her life.
WCM: Early in the memoir you recall an experience of being mistaken for a PA on the set of Desperately Seeking Susan. I wanted to know if you could talk about your success as its own form of revenge? Did that experience at all influence She-Devil’s tale of a housewife seeking revenge?
SS: When I was 26 or 27, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I hadn’t yet made a film. I’d been seriously dating somebody and we had tentative plans to get married, but that didn’t happen, and I felt jilted. Channeling all that hurt into, “I’ll show you, I’m going to make a movie,” and then having that person in the audience watch Smithereens at a screening right before Cannes was incredibly gratifying.
Channeling that, years later, into Roseanne Barr’s character, Ruth Patchett, who’s dumped by her husband for a much more—at least on the surface—glamorous, rich, and beautiful woman [Meryl Streep’s novelist character Mary Fisher], and then Ruth figuring out a way to wreak havoc on his life, is something everyone who has ever felt rejected can relate to.
Making Mr. Right (1987)
WCM: She-Devil ties back into the idea of competing identities with Roseanne Barr’s and Meryl Streep’s characters. And there are clear feminist touches, such as the domestic images of womanhood and motherhood that get twisted into a funhouse mirror, and the fantastic montage where Ruth burns down the house.
SS: For example, the opening shot, that was so important. The camera pans slowly along the cosmetic counter of Bloomingdale’s, all these gorgeous women spraying themselves with cologne, putting on make-up, and then it comes to rest upon Ruth, who will never live up to those standards—all those feminine ideals of beauty and glamor, standards that many women are held up to, or impose upon themselves, especially back then—and yet she’s still trying to, and that’s what’s sad. Over the course of the film, Ruth fails to live up to those societal imposed roles, for instance, by accidentally cooking a gerbil for dinner. After her husband leaves her, one by one she blows up these images of the housewife, like when she puts an electric light in the washing machine and watches it explode.
WCM: After She-Devil, you became a mother, and then you eased back into filmmaking with the autobiographical documentary Confessions of a Suburban Girl (1992). You returned to your hometown and talked to your childhood friends in a way that foreshadows the interpersonal dynamics of Sex and the City, for which you shot the pilot episode in 1998. The documentary is also in dialogue with a lot of other feminist documentaries like Growing Up Female (1971), charting how girls grew up before and after second-wave feminism.
SS: All of us are affected by our childhood. We can embrace it or we can rebel against it. I knew that suburbia had influenced my films. At that time, I was turning 40, and my friends, we hadn’t been in touch much. We were really living in very different worlds. I wanted to bring them together to talk about who we were, who we are now, and how different our present lives were from the ones we thought we were going to have when we last all got together, which was probably the end of high school. I wanted to evoke the feeling of having a pajama party with a bunch of 40-year-old women sitting around in a bedroom and being honest with one another.
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
WCM: In your memoir, you detail how your relationship with your mother Florence has evolved over the years, which led to you making the Florida-set, seniors romantic comedy Boynton Beach Club (2005) together—you both have producer credits—after she wrote the initial screenplay.
SS: My mother came up with the idea. Ever since I became a professional filmmaker, she has always been sending me letters and calling me up: “Oh, I just read this article in the newspaper. This would make a great movie.” This time, I thought, “Wow, that’s really interesting, to make a romantic comedy, but about senior citizens, in their sixties or above, living in a senior community.” Nowadays there are more movies and TV series that deal with that age group but back in the early 2000s, there really wasn’t. When I started talking to people in the business, they said, “There’s no market for that. We’re not interested.”
I was busy making a movie called The Ranch (2004) in Canada, but I said, “Mom, go to a bookstore, buy a book about screenwriting, Screenwriting for Dummies or whatever, and write a draft.” When I came back, there it was waiting for me. I read it—it was messy, the structure was weird, and the dialogue was awkward, but there was a lot of honesty. Many of her friends now had partners who had died, and they were dealing with being a certain age, newly single, and yet still wanting to connect, for companionship, romance, sex. I asked if I could rewrite it with a writing partner of mine.
The film was invited to some festivals. We showed it to distributors, who said, “Nice reviews, but there’s no market, it doesn’t hit a demographic we want to distribute to”—and so my mother, myself, and two other producers said, “I’ll show you.” We went out and found an owner with a bunch of theaters in Florida, where we knew we had a good demographic, because a lot of older people go to movies down there. We put the film in a couple of theaters, and it did great. Our box office numbers were reported in the trade papers, and they began to believe there was an older audience out there who went to the movies. Some of the distributors that had rejected the movie came back into the picture and said, “Okay, now we get it. Can we take over from here?” We knew we couldn’t handle national distribution, so we ended up going with Samuel Goldwyn. But there was that element again of “I’ll show you.” that seems to be a theme through much of my life.
WCM: The “I’ll show you” mentality is something a lot of minority people relate to, and I think when they read this book, they’ll see themselves in your story. Are there any other stories you’d like to tell in movies?
SS: There’s something I’m taking notes about that is still not formed—I will see where that takes me. I don’t know whether it’ll turn into a movie or another book. But I heard a great quote by Leonard Cohen about turning seventy, which I related to. He said that seventy is the foothills of old age. I don’t feel totally old-old, but I’m at the foothills. That does change the way you look at your life, and the way you reflect back.
Willow Catelyn Maclay is a film critic and co-author of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema.
Making Mr. Right (1987)
