Once more into the groove - Desperately Seeking Susan turns !5 .

Who did you cast first, your Roberta (the housewife) or your Susan (the bohemian)?A.The producers were from L.A. and had gotten Rosanna Arquette attached before the film was greenlighted. Then when I got involved, the remainder was put out of New York with up-and-coming actors - obviously, Madonna, who was not known at the time, as good as downtown types that had been in around of these independent, downtown movies.

Like Rockets Redglare, Richard Edson, who had been in Jim Jarmusch`s first movie - he hadn`t made any others at that time - and about of them had been in my first movie, "Smithereens," like Richard Hell and Susan Berman.Q.How did you find Madonna for this film?A.Madonna lived down the street from me, so she wasn`t "Madonna," in quotes. I knew her from people who were in the downtown music scene. We started to audition more up-and-coming actresses who had done some films - people like Ellen Barkin and Melanie Griffith and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kelly McGillis, who had only made one or two movies and were getting known. But still though the picture is a queer tale, in a sense, it needful to be grounded in some sort of authenticity. We didn`t want actors putting on costumes and playing downtown.Q.You wanted someone who genuinely embodied it, rather than an actor who would be performing at it or pretending it?A.Right. And she hadn`t really done a picture before. She`d played in a lot in the scope of "Vision Quest," whatever. But it wasn`t really an acting role. I hoped that because she is a performer and she had such an interesting persona, I could get that on film somehow. And that does regard a lot of acting. People sometimes think, "Oh, it`s simply being." But it`s not. When you get to say lines and hit marks and get your light and double it 20 times from different angles, it`s acting.Q.Given her inexperience, did you take to have a showcase for casting her in the film?A.Well, yes. She had to do a lot of screen tests. But it was the other years of MTV, and she happened to experience a picture that got a lot of rotation, because there just weren`t a lot of music videos at that time. I think it was for "Lucky Star." So the the Orion people out in L.A. saw that and liked the way she looked. She was also helpful in auditions for the player that was leaving to meet her boyfriend. Somewhere, in a carton in my basement, I have Madonna and Bruce Willis doing an early screen test for that.