You continued to explore that character in your next film, Desperately Seeking Susan, which I always thought you had also written yourself, because it dovetailed so perfectly with Smithereens theme-wise.
I’m very superstitious, so having a script called Desperately Seeking Susan at a time when I was desperately seeking a script felt like karma. But totally. Wren was from a working-class, New Jersey background. She wasn’t a suburban housewife, but she was an outsider who’s seeking something—who’s seeking an adventure to reinvent herself and become someone else—just as the Rosanna Arquette character of Roberta was doing in her own way, and just as Roseanne Barr is doing in She-Devil. And then if you look at The Dutch Master, that’s also about reinvention; Mira Sorvino is a bored dental hygienist working in a sterile office who is given the magical opportunity to go inside a 17th-century Dutch painting and become a character inside the painting.
I feel like there’s a bit from your mom in it as well. You describe growing up with a very conservative background, but your mom was always pushing you to try new things, and then she went back to school later in life.
It was interesting because we were in college at the same time—but not the same college—in the ’70s, which, again, was all about feminism. I think I kind of absorbed those ideas as I was becoming the person I wanted to be—like, I was an older teenager figuring out how to be an adult woman—and my mother, who was a suburban housewife who hadn’t gone to college, was kind of absorbing those ideas in her own way and saying, maybe there’s more I could be doing with my life. She was very traditional in some ways, [but] she also had a quirky side that was very curious and unafraid. And I think that was a quality she gave to her children: Don’t be afraid to fail. Give it a shot. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll find something else or you’ll try again.
After you finished writing the book, how did you feel looking back at your body of work so far?
Writing this book, I did get a chance to look back and connect some of the dots of my films. I really feel like I really did stick to telling certain kinds of stories and I never waivered. The proof is in the films. I made the movies I wanted to make, and I didn’t do it in a calculated way. I mean, I could have made more money, been more famous, done a lot of things if I had taken some other projects, but they didn’t fit in as clearly, and I wasn’t passionate about their message. And then another goal is that after 40 years of hearing other people, critics, talk about my work from the outside, I wanted to just tell my story. I know you can’t always respond to a critic. David Denby once said I should stop making movies until I learned how to—I forget the quote, it’s in there somewhere. I never said anything but it bugged me. How can you say that and not think it’s a personal attack? So this gave me a chance to address some of those things, just not in a spiteful or vengeful way.
