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From Benning's
American Dreams
(1984).
World War II. As I was writing that script (this is explained in
Landscape Suicide
), my twelve-year-old daughter [Sadie Benning] and I were taking a train from Chicago to New York, and she was reading a
Rolling Stone
article on Bernadette Protti. It bothered her, and she stopped reading. So I read it, and realized that this murder was having the same effect on her as the Gein murder had on my life in 1957, when I was fourteen.
The more I looked at the two very different murdersone occurs in snowy, central Wisconsin in the fifties; the other in the eighties in lush, green Californiathe more I liked the idea of comparing them. There were also interesting similarities in how the communities reacted. Also, each murderer had an ''out of body" experience when the murder occurred, and neither remembered what had happened.
MacDonald:
Your way of meditating on the two murders seems unusual, given the way murder is usually sensationalized in the media.
Benning:
My idea wasn't to dwell on violent acts, but to focus on how people look at themselves when they commit violent acts, and how they perceive what happened later. That's more interesting to me.
MacDonald:
Is the Gein case one you've followed?
Psycho
and other films have kept that case alive.