Susan Seidelman on Madonna, Meryl, and Four Decades of Filmmaking

Susan Seidelman always wanted to make movies. More specifically, she wanted to make movies about complex, flawed female characters who confront challenging obstacles without relinquishing their autonomy or individuality. In short, she wanted to make the movies she wasn't seeing on the screen.

Her debut feature, the punk rock drama "Smithereens," was the first American indie to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. It was also a precursor to her most widely known title, the 1985 cult classic "Desperately Seeking Susan." Starring a rising new star, Madonna, alongside actress Rosanna Arquette, "Desperately Seeking Susan" was a major influence on the zeitgeist — specifically, music, fashion and feminism. The film also set the stage for Seidelman's later directing efforts, including the Meryl Streep comedy "She-Devil," the Nora Ephron-penned "Cookie," and the pilot episode of HBO's "Sex & the City."

Now, Seidelman is sharing all that she's learned both on and off set in a new memoir, "Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers and Material Girls." The book covers her personal and professional life — from her suburban Philadelphia childhood through her years at NYU film school and her decades working as a director — though she says her primary motivation was to "write a book that I would have wanted to read back then and hopefully inspire all those people like me who feel creative and have self-doubts or need that little push to say, 'I can do it.'"

She adds, "I did not have many role models as an aspiring woman director back in the mid-'70s. I wish I had read a book like this that was honest about being a female film director. Because I do think I am looking at it through a very different lens than some of the male directors who have written books. I didn't want to do a book about the technical aspects of filmmaking as much as what it was like trying to make movies as a woman at that time, and then later on what it was like trying to combine being a mother and being a film director and wanting to be good at both. Because no one was really writing about that."

Over a Zoom call from her home in New Jersey, Seidelman spoke with Next Avenue about her memoir and 40 years of bringing quirky, messy, complicated female characters to the screen.

Next Avenue: One of the things that really stands out to me about your first feature, "Smithereens," is that I didn't like the protagonist, Wren. But I like that I didn't like her. She's moody and difficult and not particularly nice, which is rare for female characters in film. Can you talk a bit about why it was important to you to bring characters like Wren to the screen?

Susan Seidelman: The film critic Carrie Rickey was writing for The Village Voice at the time that movie came out, and one of the things she said is that Wren is allowed to make the same mistakes that male characters have made over the years in films. You know, she doesn't have to be nice. The characters that I always liked the most were complicated, were good and bad. I loved Ratso Rizzo in "Midnight Cowboy." I loved Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate." He's not a nice guy. He does very amoral things. But he's interesting. You're compelled by him. Women were always put into these boxes. There was the good girl, the mom, the devoted mother, wife, girlfriend, and then there was the slut.

The women-in-prison genre was one of my favorite genres of B-movies, because they were bad girls that were at least sort of proactive. They might be making mistakes and doing it wrong, but they were ballsy and strong. But they were still in these two separate categories and there was very little in the middle. So that became something that I wanted to do. I did a student film [at NYU] that had a character, a housewife, that has a spontaneous extramarital affair, and her motivations are complicated. That idea of making women that had both good and bad [qualities], that were complicated, that didn't fit clearly into one category or the other, was something that I have done in most of the films I've made.

During the shooting of "Smithereens," you encountered a number of obstacles. Your lead actress broke her ankle, you recast the male lead, you had no money. And yet, you ended up with a really fantastic film that still holds up today. Were there lessons that you learned as a result of these challenges that you carried with you throughout your career?

Yeah. Tenacity. I mean, I've always been tenacious, in the sense that if there's something I wanted to do, I would figure out whatever way I could, any means necessary, to quote Spike Lee. The more circumstances try to knock me down, the more I would say, "I'll show you." If you let those things get to you, you're just going to give up. Somebody once said to me, "In order to win, you have to stay at the poker table." Filmmaking was not a hobby. This was what I wanted to do as my art and as my work. And, for me, work is important.

When Susan Berman [who played Wren] broke her leg and I had used up half the money already and didn't know whether I could keep the crew together—no one was getting paid—it just made me more determined to make it, to learn from my mistakes, use the negative and turn it into a positive. Because had she not broken her leg, I don't think the film would have been as good because the original casting didn't have the chemistry [as] the casting when I replaced the lead actor with Richard Hell after the leg break. I think that changed the dynamic in the film in a lot of ways.

Your second feature was "Desperately Seeking Susan." At the start of production, Madonna was relatively unknown, but her career exploded over the course of filming. Obviously, having a star in the film can be helpful for ticket sales, but did you feel as though her meteoric rise to fame overshadowed or hurt the film in any way?

I don't. Sometimes when you're working with somebody who's a big star—and this hasn't happened to me personally, but I've heard horror stories—they come with a lot of baggage, an entourage, and demands. When you're trying to direct, there's a crew of people saying, "Don't you think her hair would look better this way or that way?" Or looking over your shoulder. That didn't happen, even though Madonna suddenly skyrocketed. My relationship with her didn't change from the beginning to the end of the film, yet we had the benefit of her stardom to promote the film. I mean, certainly it was very helpful for the studio. It was hard for Rosanna [Arquette], I'm sure, because the dynamic shifted. Suddenly it was "the Madonna movie." It's a Madonna movie, it's not the Madonna movie.

Around that time Prince came out with a movie called "Purple Rain" and I was nervous that this would be likened to that. But that was a movie that was there to promote the songs from his album. Madonna is not a singer in "Desperately Seeking Susan" and there's only one song. I didn't want her fans to be disappointed that they weren't getting her music throughout. But the studio put more promotional effort and money into the film. The same movie, if she hadn't been a star, could have disappeared, because it was a little low-budget movie. This one happened to hit because of luck and circumstances beyond my control.

You discovered that you were pregnant two weeks before filming was to begin on "Desperately Seeking Susan," and you decided to terminate the pregnancy. You write that you struggled with whether to include this detail in the memoir. Why did you opt to keep it in?

Well, let me tell you why I struggled with putting it in and taking it out. I didn't want it to be used as ammunition against women directors. I didn't want the men who still control the corporate layer of the entertainment business to go, "Look at women. They get pregnant. They want to be mothers and their attention's going to be split between family and work."

I didn't want to come across as irresponsible. It was a mistake; I wanted to deal with it. So that's why I was conflicted. The reason I put it in was because we're living in crazy times. Roe versus Wade was overturned and I'm responsibly pro-abortion. I wanted to say this can happen to anyone. These kinds of things happen. And you should have the right to control your body.

You have the unique experience of having directed both Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr in a film, "She-Devil." Meryl had never done a comedy, and Roseanne had never been on a film set. How was it for you, as a director, to work with two actors who had such vastly different careers, training and experience?

I was used to working with different actors in different ways; working with Madonna was different than working with Rosanna Arquette or Laurie Metcalf. And because Roseanne and Meryl don't have too many scenes together, it felt like different films, in a way. With Meryl, I wasn't directing her acting. I mean, what am I going to tell Meryl Streep about how to be an actress? [Laughs]

I found myself directing the story — understanding what each scene is about, what the story point is, and how to get that point across and let the actors, especially a brilliant actress like Meryl, do what she does. She knows how to prepare herself to tell that story point. I did want to make sure that all the elements that she needed, whether it was the right wardrobe, the right sets, the right secondary characters that she's interacting with, [were] working, and that we were on the same page about those things.

With Roseanne, she had never acted before. She was a stand-up comedian. She knew how to tell jokes, but the character she was playing was not particularly funny. But what Roseanne had that I really liked is that she felt so authentic. She really was that underappreciated housewife who would never live up to the traditional, mostly male, standards of beauty. I loved her authenticity.

In her real life, she was a housewife and a mom, living in the middle of nowhere, who became — in the world of sitcom television, [which is] very male-driven — the top TV star of her time. So I knew she could go from vulnerable and weak to really strong, and I wanted a try to capture that on film.

So much of what you accomplished in your career was driven by a desire to prove people wrong. You write about those who hurt you or broke your heart, and how you turned that anger into resolve. Is that something that you still carry with you? Do you still feel the need to prove yourself?

Less so, because right now I'm living in the country, I'm semi-retired, I'm writing books on my own terms, I'm writing about myself, so I only have myself to blame if it doesn't work. [Laughs] But yeah, coming of age in the early '70s, and being influenced by feminism, that feeling that we're living in a male-dominated world and if you want to succeed, you're going to have to do it for yourself, definitely influenced me from the start.

You know, film directing then, even now, to some extent, was really macho. The classic film directors, Hitchcock or John Ford — I mean, all of them — were like military generals or cowboys or guys with cigars. When things started changing, the '70s directors — Scorsese, Coppola — had their own counterculture, but still macho. They were telling stories about male power. Roger Corman had a whole group of directors who became huge stars later on, but he was helping get started by giving them horror films or B movies to direct.

They were learning how to make movies that way. He wasn't giving those opportunities to women. I knew I could knock on doors until my fingers were bloody and no one was going to hire me. I'd have to do it for myself. So I hired myself to make "Smithereens" and I hired myself to edit "Smithereens" and produce "Smithereens." Not just because I had a point to prove, but because there was something I wanted to say. And I wasn't going to let somebody stand in the way of me saying that.

You've directed feature films, short films, indie films, studio films, and television shows. Are there more stories you'd still like to tell? Do you plan to continue directing?

Yes, but I don't make movies just to make movies. Most of the movies that I consider the personal movies I've made, it's because there was a theme or a story I wanted to tell. Writing this book, there was a theme and a story I wanted to tell. And it was the pandemic, so instead of writing it on celluloid, I wrote it on a computer. I consider that like making a movie. I'm now digesting and seeing what the next story I want to tell is. I've been taking notes. But I don't want to just make a movie to make a movie. When I can synthesize what that story is, I may want to put it on film and not in a book. But I have to make sure I'm passionate about that story.

I put parts of myself in every film I've made. As I get older, the characters were getting older, too. When I made "Smithereens," I was not that much older than Wren. In "Desperately Seeking Susan," part of me identified with Susan, part of me identified with the Roberta character, because I could have been that suburban housewife. They were going through something that I was going through, that felt right for that time in my life in my early thirties.

When I did "Making Mr. Right," the character was a professional working woman who is going through issues of how to combine a romantic life with a professional life and the messiness that's involved in that sometimes. At that time, I was a professional working film director and so that was an issue I could relate to personally. I did a movie as I was getting older, "Boynton Beach Club," about people over 55 falling in love again. And "The Hot Flashes," which was about middle-aged women who want to prove they still can strut their stuff at 50 and older.

So, the next movie may have something to do with being 70, which is a different stage of older age. The singer Leonard Cohen had a great quote. He said, "Seventies is the foothills of old age." And it is. You're not totally feeling old, but you are aware that that six has changed to a seven. You are looked at differently; you feel different. And there's good things about that, as well. I'm more outspoken about what I think and what I want to say, because I don't care. I feel like I've earned it. I'm old enough to say what's on my mind. That's a good thing. But it is different. Maybe the next thing I either write for the screen or book may be dealing with that idea of your mortality, and how to grow old and still feel like you.

Sandra Ebejer lives in upstate New York with her husband, son and two cats who haven't figured out how to get along. Her work has been published in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Real Simple, Writer's Digest, Shondaland and others. Read more at sandraebejer.com or find her on Twitter @sebejer. 

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