Into the Groove: A Conversation with Susan Seidelman

I never lived above Ninth Street, and if you lived downtown in those days, you got to know the other people who were doing the same things as you. That’s when I met Amos Poe, Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver, Beth B and Scott B . . . It was a very small world. I don’t think we were influenced by one another as much as we were living in an environment that influenced us all in our own way. What was cool about the late seventies and early eighties in New York was that it felt like an open city where you could do whatever you wanted. I didn’t even know you needed permits to film in the streets! There was a sense of freedom, and, culturally, there was so much going on; the city was an incubator for art and music and performance. It was a fun time to be there.

This was the first narrative feature Ed made in New York. He’s a real artist and someone who likes to paint with light. One of the important things he taught me was that a frame shouldn’t have more than two strong colors in it at any time. When you’re watching a bad TV movie, often your eye doesn’t know where to go because there are so many colors; there’s nothing guiding your eye toward a certain thing. But Ed would craft the lighting in such a way to illuminate where your focus should be. He lit the exteriors with colored gels, which was unusual at the time—for example, the scenes outside the Magic Club, which he lit with green and purple gels.

I love that shot too. I find it fun to make visual jokes within the frame. I see that shot as a nod to the sweetness of the saccharine world she’s living in, which some people will appreciate and some will just see as decoration. But it was always great working with Santo, who was also the costume designer. We spent a lot of time trying to create two distinct worlds for the characters of Roberta and Susan, each with very specific rules. Roberta’s world was going to be all pastels and soft hues, and Susan’s world was going to be a mix of vibrant colors and black. Because Santo was doing both costumes and design, he had a unique overview of the look of the film. When he was dressing a character, he knew exactly what the frame was going to look like at any given moment.

First we established the theme and color palette for each character, then Santo presented me with a ton of options. For Madonna’s wardrobe, he went to her apartment and picked out a lot of stuff from her own closet. As for the jacket, he created it! That article of clothing was actually written into the script, but it was his choice for it to have a pyramid with a seeing eye on top. I liked that he was playing around with symbols and adding a mystical meaning to it. But that’s also the symbol on the dollar bill, so it had a material girl meaning as well.

Meryl was my top choice. I always like working against type when it comes to actors. It’s fun to be the first person to use somebody in a surprising way. That was the case with Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, Meryl in She-Devil, and John Malkovich in Making Mr. Right. I knew Meryl had done some comedic theater at Yale, but I thought it would be great to have this very serious, esteemed actress play this very frivolous, very narcissistic romance novelist who lives in a pink palace. I do think comedy can be harder than drama, because it’s so dependent on timing and precision—and you really have to go for it. You can’t be timid. There’s a scene in the bedroom with Meryl and Ed Begley Jr. when she says, “But I’m an artist, Bob.” She’s sitting on the bed, and she shakes her butt in this very funny way. It made me think, wow, she’s not afraid to push it.

I like playing with genres and using them to tell more personal stories. Making Mr. Right is a sci-fi movie that talks about the power dynamics between men and women. A lot of what’s in these films reflects where I was in my life at the time I was making them. When I was working on Making Mr. Right, I was a successful working woman, and my professional life was very together, but my personal life was very confused, so I wanted to tell a story about a woman who is also experiencing that disconnect.

It got a lot of mixed reviews. Critics had an absurd interpretation of John Malkovich’s character. They saw him as, like, a walking dildo or some kind of sex bot, as if this woman was falling in love with hardware. But what’s been interesting to see over the past few decades is how much the human relationship with AI has grown. It’s no longer so strange, is it? Even something like Siri—it’s like a friend. These things are a part of all of our lives in ways that are increasing rapidly.

In the eighties, a lot of the films set in the future felt very scary and dark and threatening, like Blade Runner or Mad Max. But since we knew this was a comedy and a social satire, we wanted to represent the future as something more playful. I referred to when I thought the future was going to be fun, like in The Jetsons or the Space Age midcentury look of the World of Tomorrow at the World’s Fair. I loved the idea that robots weren’t scary but playful.