Susan seidelman making mr right6/25/2023 You watch her grifting her way around town while looking completely gorgeous and – like Roberta – you just want to be her. But Madonna’s performance is irresistible. It might have been more difficult for Rosanna, but that’s her conversation,” says Seidelman.Īrquette is wonderful in the film as the stifled housewife. Over the course of the nine-week shoot, Madonna went from an unknown Seidelman could film walking around the East Village without any trouble to, in the last week, requiring security because Rolling Stone magazine had just put her on the cover.ĭid that change the dynamic on set, given that one person in the ensemble was suddenly so much more famous than the others? “Uhhh, not so much for me. It was the equivalent of buying Apple stock the week before Steve Jobs invented the Macintosh. Madonna had released Borderline but nothing else, and Seidelman thought she had “the right attitude” for the character. Instead, Seidelman persuaded the producers to let her cast a singer and dancer with no acting experience, who happened to live down the street from her. Seidelman’s determination to give the film a slick of authenticity means that the up-and-coming actors she decided not to cast are almost as astonishing as the ones she did: Ellen Barkin, Melanie Griffith, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jamie Lee Curtis were all rejected for the role of Susan, as they felt too LA. I just wanted to put my finger on the pulse of the time.” Because I didn’t even think in those terms when I was making it. It’s thrilling when you make something that passes the test of time. “Well, I’ve answered a lot of questions about Madonna over the years, that’s true,” she says with a laugh that suggests heavy understatement. I tell her I had originally planned to ask if she minds still being defined by a movie she made so long ago, but then I noticed beforehand that her Instagram handle is So presumably not. But Desperately Seeking Susan was a massive success, propelled in no small part by Madonna becoming a superstar just before it opened, after the release of her second album, Like a Virgin.Īnd here Seidelman is, almost 40 years later, having to spend her afternoon talking to me about a film she made when she was 33 because it’s being released for the first time on Blu-ray. “I call it no wave, because we had no money,” she says. It was only her second job after her debut Smithereens, a film about the post-punk New York scene that starred Richard Hell, and she was hailed as part of a new wave of independent film-makers. But that felt so improbable as to be unimaginable to Seidelman back when she was making the film. In retrospect, it looks inevitable that the film would become an enduring classic, a kind of Umbrellas of Cherbourg of 1980s SoHo. ‘I just wanted to put my finger on the pulse of the time’ … Susan Seidelman directing Desperately Seeking Susan in 1985. (“The area had changed,” she explains with the jadedness of a true New Yorker, albeit one now in New Jersey.) I didn’t care whether someone in Kansas would recognise them, but New Yorkers would know they were New Yorkers,” Susan Seidelman, the film’s director, tells me by video chat from her home in the New Jersey countryside, to which she and her husband recently moved after several decades in downtown New York. So I wanted to populate the film with people who were authentic to that time. “The city was falling apart and downtown there were aspiring artists because rent was so cheap. And that’s because Desperately Seeking Susan isn’t only set in a time when there were at least as many artists as rats living in New York City, it was a product of that time, too. It’s an astonishing roll call of future talent from when they were still young and hungry in Manhattan. And that’s before you get to the then even less known supporting actors: Laurie Metcalf as Arquette’s tacky sister-in-law! John Turturro as the cheesy club MC! John Lurie barely visible as a saxophone-playing neighbour! Giancarlo Esposito in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role as a street salesman! G iven that it launched the film careers of the then little known Rosanna Arquette, the entirely unknown Aidan Quinn and some singer called Madonna, 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan still stakes a good claim to be one of the canniest casting jobs of all time.
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