'Desperately Seeking Susan' at 40: Groundbreaking director shares stories behind the film

Caption

Susan Seidelman on location filming Desperately Seeking Susan in New York City in 1984.

Credit: Susan Seidelman / Facebook

40 years ago this spring, Madonna made her film debut in Desperately Seeking Susan, a stylish caper movie starring Rosanna Arquette, Aidan Quinn and a bevy of future A-listers. The story revealed the secret lives of women in Manhattan — an escaped suburban housewife and freewheeling moll on the run, both in search of independence and love. It also captured the zeitgeist of New York at the height of the 1980s, where grit, luxury, art and mayhem collided on every street corner.

Decades later, the iconic production’s themes continue to resonate in a world where women continue to fight for rights and autonomy.

The groundbreaking director behind the film, Susan Seidelman, will present Desperately Seeking Susan at the Atlanta Film Festival on May 3, where she will sign her 2024 memoir, Desperately Seeking Something, along with author Marya E. Gates (Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors in Their Own Words) and participate in a Q & A after the film screening.

Seidelman has directed dozens of films starring actors such as Meryl Streep, Brooke Shields, and Sally Field, as well as the first four episodes of Sex and the City in 1998.

GPB’s Kristi York Wooten spoke with Seidelman ahead of the film festival event. 

TRANSCRIPT:

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Kristi York Wooten: Welcome, Susan Seidelman.

Susan Seidelman: Thank you.

Kristi York Wooten: I just rewatched Desperately Seeking Susan. I go to that film often, but I hadn't seen it probably in over a year or so. So it was a nice revisitation.

And let's start right in with that, because we have just passed the 40th anniversary of that film, which was released on April 12, 1985. It [helped launch] Madonna, of course, Rosanna Arquette, Aiden Quinn, a lot of folks, kind of into their early beginnings of their careers, especially on film.

I first wanted to give an overarching question, which was inspired by something I read in the New York Times opinion pages this week about the loss of a shared culture. I think the 1980s and 1990s have gotten a bad rap for a while [deemed cheesy], but now when we look back, especially in these most recent cultural days, it feels like a renaissance back then. I mean, there's nothing to make fun of. Not only that, it's like the plethora of just amazing things that were going on in the art world and music world. And I want to get a reflection from you on that time, especially right there in the '80s.

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Desperately Seeking Susan poster

Credit: Orion pictures

Susan Seidelman: I can't talk about all of the '80s, but I can talk about my experience of the '80s in New York. The city had been really run down in the '70s. New York had a bankruptcy crisis. So suddenly, in the '80s, I think the city was coming back to life. And it was still relatively inexpensive to live in New York. So still, if you were an artist or a student, you could afford to live right in the city. And I think the fact and art was cheap to make, you know, I mean, a lot of things were going on, you know, low budget cinema, graffiti art, you know, performance art…

So there was a lot of kind of cross-pollination between the different art forms. And I think that kind of gave an energy and—for me anyway— a feeling that in some ways you didn't have to be professional to be an artist. If you had something to say, you could get it out there cheaply and find your audience. And I think that, as the world got more corporate and everything got a little scarier, we kind of lost that sense of freedom and that sense of, ‘I can become an artist, a pop star, a filmmaker, just because I have something to say and I'm gonna put it out there.’

Kristi York Wooten: Another thing I think we've lost from that era, especially in film, is attention to details. I mean, that's one of the things that makes Desperately Seeking Susan so amazing. I mean, not only the clothing, but the art direction, just little things that are lying around that are meaningful. Just every detail of the Magic Club. And I forget if Aidan Quinn or somebody's flipping through albums in one scene, there's a Television album, which is kind of like a little nod to [your first film] Smithereens [starring Richard Hell]. And then it’s just so visually appealing, it makes today's streaming films look rather bland and vanilla. I mean, the colors! Just the colors of everything.

Susan Seidelman: [Director of Photography] Ed Lachman did a great job using colored gels before they were so widely in use. I mean, after Desperately Seeking Susan, almost every MTV video had lots of colored gels, but this really was the beginning of that. And I think that you can tell, you can say so much with the right detail. So for me, that kind of observation tells you a lot about the time and the place. And it also gives the viewer something new to see when they watch the film, hopefully for the second, third or fourth time. You didn't notice that little prop in the background or that little extra John Lurie playing saxophone in the background on a rooftop. And so some of those things certain people will pick up on, but it doesn't matter whether you pick up on them or not, the story's propelling you along, but it just adds another layer.

Kristi York Wooten: That’s all the more reason on Saturday, May 3 at the Plaza Theater as part of the Atlanta Film Festival, you will be on hand to present this 40th anniversary showing. And if people have not revisited some of their favorite films, especially from the '80s and that particular era, it is really amazing to see those details on the big screen. I guarantee people they will notice things they never noticed before on their VCR or streaming or if they were able to see it in the theatre back then. I'm sure that this will be a different experience.

Susan Seidelman: Yes.

Kristi York Wooten: In your book, Desperately Seeking Something, I love how you start out in the beginning — I think it was in the intro where you talked about how you felt ordinary, like writing a memoir, you were worried that it wouldn't be dramatic enough, and that surprised me a little bit, but then I could see after expressing yourself as a director with films, you know, it might be a little daunting. But are we as women concerned that our stories aren't gonna be those compelling things? Desperately Seeking Susan is women telling their stories and seeing those, like the one of the suburban woman, Rosanna Arquette's character [Roberta], and then Susan’s, who's Madonna, with the urban vibe and the vintage clothes and the heist and all these other things.

Susan Seidelman: Well, I think that to me, that's the theme that hopefully has made the film pass the test of time, that idea that within all of us, particularly women, there is a more exciting or another version of ourselves that we want to let out. I think some men feel the same thing, too, but I do think that that's a timeless theme.

I grew up in the '60s and I went to college in the '70s, so that was the beginning of second wave feminism. So, suddenly women were talking about, "Hey, this bill of goods that we grew up thinking was gonna be so great, you know, a husband that would take care of us or a suburban lifestyle, you know, maybe we should rethink this a little bit and maybe there's some other options out there." So I think that kind of second wave feminism has informed certainly a lot of my early films.

Getting back to your point about feeling ordinary, I mean, I was very much a product of my parents, you know, after that generation of the 1950s, post-World War II, they left the city to move to the suburbs thinking that this was heaven. On some level, it looked like it was, it could have been. I mean, it was very much living in a bubble, you know, living in a safe environment.

Unfortunately, all the houses kind of look the same and all the people that gravitated to that kind of lifestyle were looking to be around people like us. There was some element of that. And at some point, and maybe it came from loving movies as a kid, or maybe it just came from some inner thing, restlessness, inner restlessness. I just started thinking, ‘There are other ways of living. There's a big world out there, and I'm not getting enough of that mix living where I grew up.”

And so, there was always this dream of living a more exciting life in another place, in a place where there was more diversity, you know, so that very much informed my desire to make Desperately Seeking Susan, because part of me very much related to the Rosanna Arquette character, but I had also left the suburbs and moved to New York 10 years earlier. So, there was some part of me that had become a little Susan-ish. And, you know, so I related to both those characters.

Caption

Susan Seidelman released her memoir in 2024.

Kristi York Wooten: Yeah, that definitely stands the test of time, because I think that there's so many people who can relate to that, especially women who have maybe experienced both of those lives. And I would say I was one of those people as well.

Okay, so let's get, let's have some fun stuff. I want to hear about working with Madonna and if you have memories of maybe some struggles on the film or something that was just hilarious that happened or anything that happened on the set that you can recall.

Susan Seidelman: What I can recall most is actually the process of casting her because she was unknown at the time. It was the early days of MTV, and she had the song “Borderline” on repeat on MTV because they didn't have that many videos. So the ones they had, they kept showing. But still she was relatively unknown in the [movie] studio. You know, we had auditioned a lot of up and coming actresses for that role, like Melanie Griffith, Ellen Barkin, Linda Fiorentino, Kelly McGillis, Jamie Lee Curtis, you know, everyone who was sort of making a name for themselves as a young actress, we met with. But there was still something about the authenticity of [Madonna] that I liked.

But we had to jump through a lot of hoops in order to be able to cast her, because the studio executives had no idea who she was. So they paid for her to fly out to California. And the funny thing was that really one of the reasons — I was pushing for her, but what really turned the studio's head around was that the son of the Senior Vice President of Production, a woman named Barbara Boyle, knew of Madonna and thought she was cute and told his mother to allow me to cast her. So that's kind of how she got cast. And I remember we were doing a screen test with Madonna, and we were in a park filming this. And I remember, you know, New Yorkers are pretty cool. They see a camera, they see some people filming, they don't really pay that much attention. Some young people walked by and looked at us and said, ‘There's Cyndi Lauper!’

But the weird thing was that over the course of the nine weeks that we were filming the movie, Madonna’s Like a Virgin album was released and suddenly she was on the cover of Rolling Stone, and she went on to be on the cover of every other magazine on earth, I think. But that's something you can't predict. It just was good timing and the right casting choice.

But it definitely had an influence on the production and on the way the film was perceived when it came out, because it was never intended as the Madonna movie. It was a movie about these two women, and it was an offbeat kind of fantasy romantic comedy, with some social points, obviously. But because her star had risen so quickly. Of course, the studio promoted it as the Madonna movie.

Kristi York Wooten: I'm sure that's what grabbed a lot of the teenagers at the time. I mean, I definitely remember seeing it. And I will say, I will never approach a public restroom hand dryer in the same way again after you see Madonna dry her underarms [in the Port Authority] and do all of that [laughs]. It's just indelible images that are kind of iconic from that time. I did want to mention, what about Rosanna Arquette, too? Because I mean, look back, she looks like a little baby in that film. She's so young.

Susan Seidelman: Yeah, I think she was probably 26, 27 at the time. You know, I think again, for her, ultimately, Madonna's fame made the movie more popular, and everyone got to see how great Rosanna is. And she really is. I mean, she's the heart and soul of the movie. Madonna is the kind of pizzazz, but the heart and soul is Rosanna, the one that goes through the most changes. But I think it must have been a little, you know, strange, you know, coming on as this young ingenue, you know … she had done a few movies before, this was going to be her next bigger movie. And then suddenly it was called the Madonna movie. But that did bring a lot more people to see Rosanna's performance. And she ended up winning a couple of awards for it.

Kristi York Wooten:  She was brilliant. And Aidan Quinn, Ihave to say, because I think that's the moment a lot of us really started noticing his work. You really hit the jackpot with kind of launching at the right moment with at least those three stars.

Susan Seidelman: Yeah, we were also lucky because watching the film again, there's a lot of little cameos of people that went on to do really great stuff, or people who this was their first screen performance. I think John Turturro, this was the first time he was on-screen. Laurie Metcalf, who's so funny, you know, was great. Mark Blum, Steven Wright, the comedian, you know, so it was a great opportunity.

And again, it was sort of a perfect setup because it was a studio movie, but Orion Pictures was the one studio where they kind of left their directors alone once they approved the budget and the cast, they weren't looking over your shoulder. And I was really nervous about having a heavy-handed studio executive questioning everything I did or second-guessing my instincts. I had never done a studio movie before. I had never done a movie with a union crew, which was also a little unusual at the time, because there were not too many women directors. So the crews, which were pretty male- driven at that time, I'm not sure what they thought about me. In fact, some of them didn't.

I tell a story in my book about an electrician that came over to me and asked me to get him a bottle of water from the craft service table. And I did. And I gave it to him. And I don't remember if he thanked me or not. But I kept thinking, “I can't wait till he finds out I'm the director.” And I got busy working with the actors, so I don't know when he did find out I was the director. But you know, there were a lot of little weird moments like that.

Kristi York Wooten: You were definitely at the forefront, as you said, of that post-second wave feminism, and then being a woman in the film industry. So who are some of your favorite women directors of the last several years? Do you have any who are really catching your eye with their work?

Susan Seidelman: I've loved many of Greta Gerwig's movies and in an industry that is an industry where the business counts, I think it's great when someone's made a billion-dollar film [like Barbie] at the box office — or nearly a billion dollars, you know, so “Bravo!”  And there's a woman named Emerald Fennell, she's British [and rose to fame acting in Call the Midwife and directed 2023’s Saltburn], and she does dark comedies. There are so many more women, which is a good thing, although a lot of them are working in television, because the industry has changed so much.

Caption

Susan Seidelman, Madonna and Rosanna Arquette

Credit: Susan Seidelman

Kristi York Wooten: Streaming has changed everything for movies.

Susan Seidelman: So, in terms of feature films, there's less being made and the statistics for men versus women who were directing the bigger budget feature films are still pretty bad. I think last year it was still only somewhere 15 to 16 percent of all theatrical feature films were directed by women. But in television, there definitely are much more.

So the good news is that there's more women getting a chance to direct. The bad news is that less people are going to see their movies on big screens in dark theaters.

Kristi York Wooten: [Which we will be able to do in Atlanta on May 3.] Have you ever been to Atlanta before? Have you filmed anything here?

Susan Seidelman: As a kid, I remember going with my parents and I remember Peachtree Plaza. That's the only thing I remembered the name. But no, I'm looking forward to going and I've never filmed work there or explored the city.

Kristi York Wooten: That's gonna be great. We'll be happy to have you. [Final tease for Desperately Seeking Susan]: Are there any Easter eggs we in the film should look out for at the screening? I know we talked about some of the details, but do you have any just favorite Easter eggs that are in the film that maybe I haven't even noticed, even though if I've seen it a million times, what should I be looking for?

Susan Seidelman: I'll tell you, some of the Easter eggs are things I really like frames within frames. So movies within the movie or the TV shows within the movie, they're little gems that were selected for very specific purposes. Somebody rewatching the movie might pay attention to what is playing on TV or what was showing at the movie theater where Aidan Quinn is the projectionist.

You know, one of my funny little jokes is that the film at the end that he's projecting, you hear the actor in it say, you know, something like, “Prepare your androids” or “Get your androids ready” or something about androids, which is what I went on to make my next film about, Making Mr. Right.

One of the other little surprises is that this is a film about doubles. One of the things that happened, we were filming a scene on 25th Street, and it's a scene where Madonna gets out of a car and goes into the newspaper office to place an ad “Desperately seeking stranger.”

And as we were setting up to film, three guys were walking down the street and they turned out to be triplets dressed in identical clothing. And so we asked them if they wouldn't mind standing in the doorway because that theme of doubles and triples and doppelgangers and all that kind of stuff just seemed to fit the movie so well. And they agreed to do that. And it was just a freak accident. But one of the things that happened many years later, it turned out that they made a documentary about those triplets called Three Identical Strangers. And if people want to watch that and then take a look at that little moment in Desperately Seeking Susan, I think they'll find that fascinating.

Kristi York Wooten: Thank you for sharing that. Appreciate your time, Susan.

Susan Seidelman: Sure! Thank you.