Susan Seidelman on being a woman director in Hollywood

The last time Susan Seidelman was at the Edinburgh International Film Festival it was the middle of the 1980s, Thatcher and Reagan were in power, the Cold War was still in full swing, and Seidelman had a movie starring one of the most famous women in the world to show.

The star was Madonna and the movie was Desperately Seeking Susan. “It was the first time I ate haggis,” she recalls as she sits in her home just outside New York. “I can’t wait to come back and try it again.”

More than 30 years later she is returning to Edinburgh for the film festival, though not with a new film this time. Instead, her directorial debut, Smithereens – the film she made before Desperately Seeking Susan – is the centre of attention.

Smithereens is part of the festival’s retrospective strand of 1980s American cinema, including a focus on female American directors of the early 1980s. Seidelman’s film will show alongside the likes of vampire movie Near Dark, an early work by Kathryn Bigelow, who went on to make Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit, and Amy Heckerling’s film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, one of the seminal coming-of-age movies of the 1980s.

The retrospective is a chance to reflect on a moment in time when American women were pushing at the door of the American film industry and, 30 years on, to ask how far open they pushed it.

Watching the films that make up the strand, curator Niall Greg Fulton suggests, is “almost like some alternative Hollywood version of the eighties.” A version that bypasses yuppies and Rambo, for pop culture and women.

Smithereens itself is a case in point. Made over two years on a tiny budget, it’s the story of Wren, a suburban girl who journeys to New York’s East Village to reinvent herself as a rock star. With The Feelies on the soundtrack and Richard Hell in the cast it catches a moment in time.

New York at the start of the 1980s felt like a city that was falling apart. It was dirty and dangerous, a place of garbage strikes and muggings and graffit. But it was also a city cheap rents and so it was full of artists – musicians, DJs, visual artists and film-makers. Some of them were even women.

“I didn’t know how hard it was for women because I didn’t know any women who were directors,” suggests Seidelman. “So, in some ways I felt I was working in uncharted territory. Probably other women felt the same way and there was something liberating about that because I didn’t know the rules, so I wasn’t stopped by any of the rules.”

In a way Wren’s story in Smithereen’s was also Seidelman’s. “I was a girl who had grown up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It was a pretty bland suburban landscape. Like the character in Smithereens I hit my teens and I kept thinking: ‘There’s got to be some other world out there that I can be a part of.’”

Smithereens was her vehicle. Made on a wing and a prayer, it was chosen for Cannes and suddenly Seidelman seemed to have a future in the film industry.

Others followed in her wake, notably Kathryn Bigelow and Penelope Spheeris, both of whom proved better able to navigate Hollywood than Seidelman in the long run.

Indeed, looking at the women directors whose work features in the Edinburgh retrospective Bigelow stands out as the one who has gone on to make a career at Hollywood’s top table. It may be significant that she has always been interested in telling stories that place men front and centre.

“She was very shrewd and always thought of making films as a military campaign and was also making films with male characters,” points out Bigelow’s friend and fellow film-maker Lizzie Borden. “And she’s also a genius at conveying an immersive experience.”

Not all film-makers want to do what Bigelow has done of course. Borden for one. A visual artist who emerged from New York’s visual art scene and second wave feminism at the same time as Seidelman, she turned to cinema after immersing herself in the films of Jean Luc Godard.

Borden is represented at Edinburgh by her film Working Girls, a kind of anti-Pretty Woman avant la lettre. It’s a movie about middle-class prostitution and, Borden suggests, asks the question: “What is the difference between renting your body or your mind?”

“It was a film about labour, she says now. “And I really wanted to turn the view around, so it would be the woman’s point of view on men. Usually, it was the other way around. And I didn’t want to do it in a sexy way. I always said if anyone got turned on by the film then something was wrong with them.”

Seidelman and Borden are very different film-makers and yet there is an equivalence in the way their careers, if you want to use that word, have developed. Early promise stymied by lack of opportunities. And partly that is down to the fact that both directors wanted to make movies about women. And that has proved a problem.

Women as film-makers and women as audience members have always been undervalued by the American film industry. The people making the decisions are almost invariably men. Between 2007 and 2017, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, of the top grossing 1000 films nearly 96 per cent of them were directed by men. And last year in the 100 most successful films in the US there were twice as many male characters as female.

In short, it’s not an equal playing field. “I’ve made movies that have been successful and I’ve made movies that have flopped box office-wise,” says Seidelman, “and I know some male directors who’ve had an equal track record. And because they’re part of a boy’s club they’re given a lot more shots. I think women are scrutinised in a different way.”

It hasn’t helped that the ecology of the American film industry has changed too. The midmarket Hollywood film – Seidelman’s natural territory – has effectively disappeared. American films these days are either no-budget or huge budget.

“There are women in Hollywood trying to break in and achieve parity in that existing system,” suggests Borden “and then there are the rest of us who want to do our own material but if we’re not doing it for 10,000 dollars … It’s really difficult to get the couple of million dollars to do anything.”

Borden’s own desire to make female-centred films about women on the margins meant she has struggled even more than Seidelman.

“For me I was at some point given the possibility to make erotic thrillers and I didn’t want to do that because I realised that involves a women being punished for her sexual impulses.”

But maybe things are opening up in other areas Both Seidelman and Borden point to the new era of television and streaming services where shows like Jenji Kohan’s Orange is the New Black employ more women writers and actors than men.

“A lot of the women who are working today are working in television and that may be our new form,” suggests Borden. “Even Jane Campion is getting into it with Top of the Lake so maybe things are shifting. But it’s definitely slow.”

Smithereens and Working Girls are showing at the Edinburgh Filmhouse on Thursday and Saturday respectively as part of the American Women retrospective strand.

FIVE FILMS BY WOMEN DIRECTORS AT THIS YEAR’S EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Mary Shelley

Tuesday, June 26; Thursday June 28, Cineworld.

Saudi Arabia’s Haifaa al-Mansour, whose debut Wadjda was the first feature film made by a Saudi woman, brings her film about the pioneering woman of British Gothic fiction to Edinburgh. Elle Fanning plays the author of Frankenstein.

Unicorn Store

Friday, June 29, Odeon; Saturday, June 30, Cineworld.

Brie Larson, soon to be Marvel superheroine Captain Marvel, makes her directorial debut with this quirky drama in which she also co-stars alongside Samuel L Jackson.

The Butterfly Tree

Friday, June 29, Cineworld; Saturday, June 30, Odeon.

Priscilla Cameron’s Australian drama stars Melissa George as a burlesque performer turned florist who entrances a father and his son.

Waru

Saturday, Odeon; Sunday Cineworld.

Eight Maori women directors combine to tell a story of a Maori funeral, with each director telling the story from a different woman’s perspective.

Wild Nights with Emily

Thursday, June 28, Odeon; Saturday, June 20, Cineworld.

Madeleine Olnek tells the story of American poet Emily Dickinson in a film that challenges the popular image of the poet as a tortured recluse. Molly Shannon plays Dickinson.