Director Susan Seidelman, known for the beloved Madonna starrer *Desperately Seeking Susan*, says, “Music is where women really excel these days.”
“It’s been interesting to watch this explosion of strong, powerful women in music in the last five years,” she explains. “It’s not just Taylor Swift. There seem to be so many singer-songwriters who have the power and the confidence to tell very female, very personal stories through their music, showing their strengths and flaws. Lola Young’s ‘Messy’ [written by Young and Conor Dickinson] is a great example of that.”
She adds, “And you know what? They’re also making money. They are showing the bosses at the record companies there’s a big audience for their stories. One of the things I was really pleased about with *Desperately Seeking Susan* was that it was not only a very feminist film, but it made money for the studio. I think they were surprised by that and I was thrilled to have proven them wrong.”
Seidelman spoke recently at Poland’s Tauron American Film Festival, where she picked up the Indie Star Award for her career. She noted that the current indie cinema scene isn’t quite as thriving as it once was.
“I’m very glad I started my career in the early 80s, because that was such a wonderful time for independent cinema, especially in New York. Things are very different now for all cinema. It has been happening for a while and I think COVID has really sped it up,” she remarked.
Seidelman made her feature debut with *Smithereens* in 1982. The film, picked up by Cannes, follows Wren, who leaves New Jersey convinced she’ll make it big.
“In some ways, that’s my most autobiographical movie. I was this girl who came from a small town in Pennsylvania and didn’t have a clear goal. I didn’t know I would end up being a film director, but I knew there was a bigger world out there,” she recalls. “Wren seems directionless, but she just wants to be a part of something else. That was certainly true of New York at that time, when it was still very cheap. It attracted many outsiders who thought they’d meet other people like them in NYC, and they usually did.”
Seidelman quickly became known for her heroines and felt “not just a responsibility, but an urge” to tell female stories where women were in control.
“For better or for worse. In *Smithereens,* Wren’s not going down a positive path, but she’s an active protagonist. That was very important to me, because when I was growing up, all the fun roles always went to men, whether it was Robert Redford and Paul Newman or De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. The women were the wives, the girlfriends or the ‘bad girls’ who ended up dead or in prison.”
*Desperately Seeking Susan*, which has just turned 40, established Seidelman as a director to watch. The film centered on “female empowerment, and that theme is universal and timeless,” she states. “It was relevant in 1985 and it’s still relevant today.”
However, some of her subsequent films, including the sci-fi rom-com *Making Mr. Right* with John Malkovich and *She-Devil*, were not as warmly received, leading Seidelman to say she was placed in “movie jail.”
“There are men who’ve been in movie jail too, but I do think it happens much more with women, certainly during my time. ‘Well, we gave her a shot. It didn’t work.’ It’s that kind of excuse,” she admits. “Hollywood has always been a boys’ club. Projects were greenlit based on who you saw at lunch or on the golf course. Women weren’t part of those clubs or maybe they didn’t want to be, so they didn’t have as much latitude.”
Both films have been described as “men-hating,” Seidelman says.
“I was a female director and some critics said that in *Making Mr. Right* I claimed men are terrible and that Frankie [played by Ann Magnuson] could only have a relationship with an android lover. But I was taking the Pygmalion myth and twisting it around! Men had been telling their version for a long time, whether it’s *Pretty Woman* or *My Fair Lady,* and I thought: ‘Why can’t I make some points about the power dynamic between men and women’?”
Now, viewers are discovering these films anew.
“It’s a perfect example of a movie that works better today than it did in 1987. You know, there are many things I miss about the way people used to make movies. I miss 35mm film and big movie theaters. But the thing about streaming is that people get to discover a lot of things.”
In the 1990s, Seidelman was nominated for an Academy Award for the short *The Dutch Master*, featuring Mira Sorvino. She also introduced the world to *Sex and the City*, directing its influential pilot episode.
“Later, it changed and became a different story. But at the beginning, it was almost electric,” she recalls.
“In many of my films, I tried to turn NYC into a character. That was important in *Sex and the City*: It wasn’t just about the women. It was about these women in this particular city at this particular time,” she notes.
“Back in the mid-90s, television looked terrible, so I approached it like a short film. It was important to capture some of that energy and grit. Thankfully, HBO allowed me to work with a really good DoP, Stuart Dryburgh, who also did Jane Campion’s *The Piano.* We also got to be more experimental, with Carrie talking directly to the camera. After I left, they said: ‘Let’s get rid of all that,’” she laughs.
“One of the things I liked about these early episodes is that the women were still kind of raw and aspirational. They all had a bit of that downtown funk about them. Then they became very uptown,” she adds.
“I like messiness. When a character is totally put together, they’re not as interesting.”
Now, Seidelman says, it’s “important to pass the baton” to other directors.
“I do like to give advice to the younger generation. I tell them the hardest thing about being a director is finding your point of view. What’s your vision? What makes you different from anyone else? When I was starting out, I wasn’t seeing stories about women, especially not in Hollywood. It became my mission.”
“When I started teaching at NYU about 12 years ago, most of my class were men. By the time I finished, half of the class were women. They had the drive and were passionate about the stories they wanted to tell. They also had a desire to be good. They really wanted to be good.”
https://variety.com/2025/film/global/susan-seidelman-indie-star-award-music-taylor-swift-1236570750/