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work through the prison officials to get permission. I'd like to film eight to ten hours of her talking and then work with that footage until it suggests images. I don't really want to tell if she's innocent or guilty. I want to see where her life has been, where it's going.
In the four years she's been in prison, she's been active politically. She corresponded with male prisoners at the Wisconsin State Prison to find out what their rights were, and discovered that women prisoners were allowed to do much less than the menin terms of the number of phone calls they could make, the amount of exercise equipment available, things like that. She filed suit against the state and won, upgrading the rights of women prisoners in Wisconsin.
MacDonald:
How do you plan to get funding for the film?
Benning:
Well, that's always a problem. I do want to film her; I'm going to get that done even if I have to borrow. I think once I have her on film, there'll be no problem raising money to finish the film. She's so interesting. At times she's naive, the twenty-one-year-old girl she was when the murder was committed. And since that time, she's become a well-read, self-taught Marxist/feminist with experience working with the system. And she's been in prison for four years, so she's also a hard-core lifer. Her three languages mix and separate from moment to moment. I meet with her four hours at a time and it seems to go by in minutes. I think I've developed a rapport with her, and I think she's pretty honest, but like I said, I can't tell what the truth is about her case. I finally asked her if she was innocent, and she said, "Of course, I am."
MacDonald:
You said earlier you'd like to make enough money from your films to support yourself. What's the state of your film rentals?
Benning:
They get rented more every year, but more doesn't mean it's enough to live on. I've pretty much exhausted the grant possibilities. At the moment, I have no income, except for rentals and visiting-artists fees, which I probably could get by on, except that I wouldn't have any money to make films. I'm at the peak of my career. I just had a retrospective at the Whitney. And I have the least money I've ever had. It seems like at some point you shouldn't have to talk like this. Other kinds of artists don't. I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining. I'm very happy. It's just frustrating to be at this point in my career and not know if I'm going to have rent money next month.