So with Wren, I was interested in not having her fit into any of those categories. She’s a liar and she’s manipulative, but I didn’t want to judge her because all my favorite male characters at the time were always liars and manipulators—Jack Nicholson in Cuckoo’s Nest, or Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. That’s what made a character interesting, that they were a combination of good and bad and that they weren’t afraid to be manipulative.
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, 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.