Into the Groove: A Conversation with Susan Seidelman
Throughout her four-decade career as a writer and director, Susan Seidelman has told complex stories about unconventional women striving to express themselves and maintain their autonomy. Her genre-melding films fuse a passion for the pleasures of Hollywood spectacle with a playful punk ethos informed by the years she lived in downtown Manhattan in the midseventies.
Like many of the heroines she has created, Seidelman left suburban life for the allure of the bohemian city. After high school, she enrolled in the film department at New York University, where she directed two short films that prepared her for making her debut feature, Smithereens (1982). A lo-fi blueprint for her subsequent portraits of women reinventing themselves, this gritty and glamorous 16 mm snapshot of a bygone era of New York life became the first independent American film to compete for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Its success placed Seidelman in the Hollywood spotlight and set her up for her next film, Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), a madcap New York odyssey that revolves around mistaken identity, starring a pre–Like a Virgin Madonna alongside Rosanna Arquette in her first leading role.
But rough-hewn urban character studies are hardly Seidelman’s only forte. She has ventured into several other styles, including the prescient sci-fi of Making Mr. Right (1987), which stars Ann Magnuson as a publicist who falls in love with a handsome android (John Malkovich), and the diabolical revenge comedy of She-Devil (1989), in which Meryl Streep plays a narcissistic romance novelist who seduces a married man and suffers the wrath of his wife (Rosanne Barr). Then, in the nineties, Seidelman further cemented her status as an iconic New York artist when she directed the pilot episode of Sex and the City, setting the tone for one of the most beloved television shows of all time.
With a collection of Seidelman’s films now playing on the Criterion Channel, I spoke with the director about the feminist spirit that runs throughout her work and the collaborations that bring her vibrant films to life.