I think we started filming - I might be a year off here, been a while - in 1980, in May or June. It was filmed in three different sections. Stop and go, stop and go, over a period of a year. You shot it, if I understand correctly, in fits and starts it wasn’t like we banged it out in two weeks, you were sort of stop and go? It was dirty and grungy and there was something about that, the textured feeling of the city, that made it very cinematic and interesting to me. That inspired the kinds of characters and the look of the film. And because of that, there was a lot going on - especially downtown.Īnd so out of that environment - it’s cheap and it’s creative and there’s all these things happening - Smithereens sort of came to be?Ībsolutely. It was a great time to be creative and poor, because life was cheap there. And I didn’t I didn’t even think, oh it’s dangerous. There was something that’s liberating about being so naïve! I’m five feet tall and I would take the subway home at night from some venue at three o’clock in the morning to St. Perhaps also coming from being an outsider coming into the city, I didn’t know how dangerous it was. This is before Giuliani came in and suddenly things were more restrictive.Īnd you know, when you’re younger, you’re a little bit fearless. There was a lot of street-art activity, because it was cheap and it wasn’t forbidden. As you know, the recession had hit New York in the mid-’70s, so there wasn’t a lot of policing going on. There was something very, you know, outsider-ish about it that was exciting and also inexpensive. It was kind of grungy, but to me that was what made it interesting. What was your experience of the city coming in, was that stuff accurate or was that overblown? That’s certainly how it’s portrayed in movies of the period. New York in the mid-’70s - we hear and read a lot about what a hellhole it was at that time. But the idea of going to film school, getting involved, getting to be around people who liked film, was exciting to me - and also getting out of suburban Philadelphia, that was the big motivator. I knew I liked watching movies, but I really didn’t know of any female directors as role models, at that time.
#SUSAN SEIDELMAN MAKING MR RIGHT PROFESSIONAL#
Because I really liked filmmaking, but at that time - it was like ’73, ’74 - the thought of actually being a professional female director, it was like a fantasy, it wasn’t an actual concrete goal. I knew wanted to be in New York and NYU was sort of an excuse to get me there. So you were born and raised in Philadelphia, and then you moved to New York to go to NYU? Smithereens screens at the Quad on Saturday, and it will make its Blu-ray debut in August as part of the prestigious Criterion Collection. Right, She-Devil, Boynton Beach Club, and The Hot Flashes she also directed episodes of Sex and the City (including its pilot), Stella, and Now and Again. Seidelman’s other films include Making Mr. Three years later, Seidelman released her sophomore feature, Desperately Seeking Susan, which used the downtown scene as the setting for a throwback identity-swap/amnesia screwball comedy it was a box-office hit, thanks in no small part to Seidelman’s prescient decision to cast, in the title role, an up-and-coming club performer named Madonna. It centers on a self-promoting downtown wannabee named Wren (Susan Berman) anxious to break into the fading punk scene, but the film is remembered less for its plot than for its quicksilver energy and low-budget ingenuity shooting on the cheap in downtown NYC in 1980–81, Seidelman deployed the kind of guerrilla-style cinematography and personality-driven performance that would come to define late-20th-century American independent cinema.īolstered by a hard-driving soundtrack (including several songs by the Feelies, an arrangement made by Jonathan Demme, an admirer who saw the film in its rough cut form), Smithereens became the first American independent film to compete for the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. Smithereens, her 1982 debut feature, was co-written by future Oscar nominee Ron Nyswaner ( Philadelphia), with a cast that included punk icon Richard Hell.
#SUSAN SEIDELMAN MAKING MR RIGHT SERIES#
When the Quad Cinema announced their retrospective series “The New York Woman” (running through July 19), Susan Seidelman’s inclusion was a given the Philadelphia-born, NYU-educated filmmaker directed two of the great New York movies of the ’80s ( Smithereens and Desperately Seeking Susan), and the pilot for one of the great New York TV series of the ’90s, Sex and the City.
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