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Susan Seidelman didn’t set out to write a memoir. After 43 years living in New York City, the movie director had recently decamped to the “farmland” of New Jersey. “I’ve made fun of New Jersey in every single movie I’ve ever made,” she says, laughing, from her house in the Garden State. “I never thought I would move there.” Then a string of events—the pandemic; her 70th birthday; and the death of her friend Mark Blum, who appeared in Desperately Seeking Susan, perhaps her most famous film—put her in a contemplative frame of mind. “I had a lot of time to think about stuff,” she notes. “I don’t feel like an old person, but the number 70 speaks for itself, and as Leonard Cohen once said, very smartly, Seventy is the foothills of old age. There’s no getting around it.’”
She had started taking notes on her phone (“They mostly came to me when I was in the shower”), recalling moments from her life growing up in Philadelphia and her long career making movies and television, including Desperately Seeking Susan; the cult classic Smithereens; the lesser-known yet equally brilliant Making Mr. Right (in which a young, blonde John Malkovich plays an antisocial scientist and his lookalike android, the latter of which falls in love with a high-powered marketing executive played by Ann Magnuson); She-Devil, with Meryl Streep as an uber-femme romance writer who steals Roseanne Barr’s nothing of a husband (think of it as a darker, proto-First Wives Club, but with just one wife); and several episodes from Sex and the City’s first season (including the pilot, and the one with Amalita Amalfi).
Eventually, her hundreds of notes turned into Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir about Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls, out now, which reads like a conversation with a close friend who is excited to show you the ropes. We spoke with Seidelman about how feminism changed her life, her love of fashion, and why she felt “protected by creativity” in her youth.
Vogue: One of the things that struck me while reading the book was a sort of bursting energy; you’re telling the story of what happened then and what happened in the future simultaneously
Susan Seidelman: I think that comes from being a director and an outsider. I’m inside myself when I’m telling the story of what I did at 15 or at 25; but then there is that narrator part of me, the director part of me, that’s watching from the outside and aware that this is what I was like then, but then 20 years later, this other thing would happen. Even with some of the bad things that happened in my life, there’s always been a part of me that’s been in the moment and outside of the moment at the same time. And again, maybe that’s why I ended up being a director and never wanted to be an actor, because an actor has to be in the moment, and if you pull yourself out then you’ve lost the character. I kind of wrote the book as if I was directing a movie, because that’s the only way I know how to approach life.
It’s funny, too, because you set out to study fashion design before accidentally stumbling upon your passion for filmmaking, and that makes perfect sense when you watch your movies, because everyone always has such great style.
Fashion was a way for me to express myself as a young girl, and then I wanted to make those fashions move and talk and add music and all that. But that visual shorthand of putting somebody in something and having them walk into a room and the audience gets an instant impression about who they are is very important to me. In Smithereens, it’s all about Wren and what she’s wearing. She’s holding these sunglasses, and you just know that that girl in the vinyl houndstooth skirt is absolutely going to grab those sunglasses—I didn’t have to add dialogue to that at all. Or when we first see Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, with the pyramid jacket and the fishnets, or Roseanne Barr’s character wearing a pastel smock in a pastel hair salon. You just know something about them.
You applied on a whim to film school and got in. Was it strange to suddenly discover that not only do you love making films, but you’re very good at it, and have your first short film get nominated for a Student Academy Award and your first feature film go to Cannes?
I think my films started getting attention because I wasn’t planning a professional career; I was just going with my gut and telling stories that I wanted to tell. But believe me, I needed that kind of validation. At the same time, it was also the way things happened to come together. I didn’t know about feminism when I was a kid, but suddenly when I was in college in the early ’70s, feminism was the theme that became a big part of my life, whether I was reading books about it or just being influenced by the culture of that time. But I knew early on that no one was going to do it for me, especially in such a male-dominated industry, and if I was going to become a filmmaker, I’d have to hire myself. That theme was there in my early student films and, well, it’s also in all my films for the last 40 years.
You describe running around Manhattan making Smithereens with complete abandon, including in places that were deemed unsafe, but feeling that “creativity protected” you. It felt more meaningful than just talking about a specific scene.
Well, there was a kind of protection for me in that mix of naiveté. I didn’t know how dangerous things could be. I didn’t come from an artistic family; I always felt a little different, and I admired the boldness of artists. You have to be bold. So that boldness also was a kind of protection, that you could do these crazy things in the name of art and you’d be safe.
When you write about Wren, the main character in Smithereens played by Susan Berman, you say you wanted to create this character without judging her, and with it I felt like you were also creating yourself a little bit.
It’s a bit like Where’s Waldo? I’m always hidden in there somewhere. I think growing up, especially in the ’60s—and this is the pre-hippie ’60s, because hippie counterculture didn’t really hit the suburbs until well into the ’70s, so it was still like the ’50s in a way—girls were put into categories: you were either a good girl or a bad girl. I was brought up to be a good girl, but I liked the bad girls, and I had a little bit of mischievousness in me as well. At the time, the characters in films reflected that same notion: good girls, loyal housewives, supportive girlfriends, or sluts. That’s why I liked women in prison movies when I was growing up, because they were the cool, bad girls that got to break out of the box and break some rules.
So with Wren, I was interested in not having her fit into any of those categories. She’s a liar and she’s manipulative, but I didn’t want to judge her because all my favorite male characters at the time were always liars and manipulators—Jack Nicholson in [One Flew Over the] Cuckoo’s Nest, or Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. That’s what made a character interesting, that they were a combination of good and bad and that they weren’t afraid to be manipulative.
You continued to explore that character in your next film, Desperately Seeking Susan, which I always thought you had also written yourself, because it dovetailed so perfectly with Smithereens theme-wise.
I’m very superstitious, so having a script called Desperately Seeking Susan at a time when I was desperately seeking a script felt like karma. But totally. Wren was from a working-class, New Jersey background. She wasn’t a suburban housewife, but she was an outsider who’s seeking something—who’s seeking an adventure to reinvent herself and become someone else—just as the Rosanna Arquette character of Roberta was doing in her own way, and just as Roseanne Barr is doing in She-Devil. And then if you look at The Dutch Master, that’s also about reinvention; Mira Sorvino is a bored dental hygienist working in a sterile office who is given the magical opportunity to go inside a 17th-century Dutch painting and become a character inside the painting.
I feel like there’s a bit from your mom in it as well. You describe growing up with a very conservative background, but your mom was always pushing you to try new things, and then she went back to school later in life.
It was interesting because we were in college at the same time—but not the same college—in the ’70s, which, again, was all about feminism. I think I kind of absorbed those ideas as I was becoming the person I wanted to be—like, I was an older teenager figuring out how to be an adult woman—and my mother, who was a suburban housewife who hadn’t gone to college, was kind of absorbing those ideas in her own way and saying, maybe there’s more I could be doing with my life. She was very traditional in some ways, [but] she also had a quirky side that was very curious and unafraid. And I think that was a quality she gave to her children: Don’t be afraid to fail. Give it a shot. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll find something else or you’ll try again.
After you finished writing the book, how did you feel looking back at your body of work so far?
Writing this book, I did get a chance to look back and connect some of the dots of my films. I really feel like I really did stick to telling certain kinds of stories and I never waivered. The proof is in the films. I made the movies I wanted to make, and I didn’t do it in a calculated way. I mean, I could have made more money, been more famous, done a lot of things if I had taken some other projects, but they didn’t fit in as clearly, and I wasn’t passionate about their message. And then another goal is that after 40 years of hearing other people, critics, talk about my work from the outside, I wanted to just tell my story. I know you can’t always respond to a critic. David Denby once said I should stop making movies until I learned how to—I forget the quote, it’s in there somewhere. I never said anything but it bugged me. How can you say that and not think it’s a personal attack? So this gave me a chance to address some of those things, just not in a spiteful or vengeful way.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
