Cyndi Lauper Reveals She Refused to Record 'Girls Just Want to Have Fun' at First Because It Was Written by Men

When Cyndi Lauper first heard "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," she didn't want to record it. Now, she's proud of its feminist legacy.

The story behind her signature hit was revealed in Let the Canary Sing, a new documentary about Lauper's life and career that premiered at Tribeca Festival on Wednesday — where she spoke to PEOPLE about the film and her music.

"I was trying really hard to make an anthem that would inspire women and open the doors to all women," Lauper, 69, tells PEOPLE of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," the lead single off her debut album She's So Unusual. "Not just one group of women, but every little girl could see herself and realize that she too could have a joyful experience in life."

But she didn't see the potential for it to become an empowering song for women upon first listen. "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" was written and originally recorded by Robert Hazard, and Lauper's producer at the time, Rick Chertoff, took her to see him perform it live.

In the documentary, Chertoff recalled Lauper pulling his ear down toward her during the performance and telling him, "I would never do that f---ing song."

At the time, she didn't want to record a song about women that was written from a male perspective. "Every time we want to have fun, we're whores," said Lauper in Let the Canary Sing.

She and Chertoff worked on "many demos" of the song, as Lauper wanted to make it sound more fun if she was going to sing from a female point of view. "It should be in a trumpet key because we're trumpeting an idea," she said in the film of her approach to "Girls Just Want to Have Fun."

In the studio, she strived to make the song sound like a vacation, inspired by commercials for Raceway Park in New Jersey. After trying out new sounds and landing on the now-iconic guitar lick, Lauper recalled in the film, "All of a sudden, we all heard it."

Once it came time to make the music video for "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," Lauper wanted to cast a diverse group of women. She was tired of seeing only one race of people in videos from different genres of music at the time. "It was a good message for kids and teenage girls particularly," said Boy George in the doc.

Lauper also wanted to cast her mother, Catrine, to play her mom on screen. "I told my mother, 'If you do this, it's going to bring mothers and daughters closer,'" she recalled in the film. "I got to share my success with my mom." (Catrine died at age 91 last year following a battle with Alzheimer's and vascular dementia.)

"My mom was with me, and I just feel I was really lucky and privileged to do that," Lauper tells PEOPLE, looking back on the success of the song, which hit No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remains iconic today.

"Now, my sister [Ellen] and my brother [Fred] came, and they were in [Let the Canary Sing], and they were talking," adds the Grammy winner. "Family, I guess, is very important."