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What I Want My Words to Do to You offers an unprecedented look into the minds and hearts of the women inmates of New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. The film goes inside a writing workshop led by playwright Eve Ensler, consisting of fifteen women, most of whom were convicted of murder. Through a series of exercises and discussions, the women, including former Weather Underground Members Kathy Boudin and Judith Clark, delve into and expose the most terrifying places in themselves, as they grapple with the nature of their crimes and their own culpability. The film culminates in an emotionally charged prison performance of the women's writing by acclaimed actresses Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Rosie Perez, Hazelle Goodman, and Mary Alice. The film focuses on a writing group led by internationally acclaimed playwright and activist Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues) at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester, New York. Ensler's classes have given birth to a powerful writing community in which women from strikingly different strata of society, all of whom are serving long sentences for murder and other serious crimes, help each other tell true stories that sear the soul. What I Want My Words to Do to You documents both the wrenching personal journey undertaken by the inmates to find -and understand the words that tell their own stories, and the power of those words to move the wider world. Throughout the film, the acclaimed group of actors appears briefly, performing excerpts of the inmates' exercises. Also included are short, revealing glimpses of a rehearsal session, during which the actresses grapple with the enormous responsibility of reading these texts. Here, Glenn Close admits that in her “actor's mind,” she can imagine what murder might feel like, but connecting to the profound remorse of a woman who killed a senior citizen proves difficult. The writing group members confront the lives they've ruined, the families left behind, and their own lives as they might have been. Gary Sunshine and film editor Madeleine Gavin (Sunday, Signs and Wonders, Manic) structured What I Want My Words to Do to You around the writing exercises that Ensler had assigned to the inmates. The exercises appear deceptively simple at first: inmates are asked to “Tell the facts of your crime.” As the film progresses, the process of writing itself becomes a process of discovery and self-reflection. The inmates face painful truths about the choices that irrevocably changed the course of their lives. The filmmakers use the exercises – and the highly charged discussions they trigger – to reveal how much the women grapple with their own culpability.
History of the Writing Group In 1998, Obie-winner Ensler first visited the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. While she had long devoted her artistic and activist energies to helping homeless women and survivors of violence here in America and around the world, she had never before come into contact with women in prison. Ensler, who had taught at the university level, volunteered to be a writing instructor at Bedford. She quickly established powerful connections to the inmates. Ensler's method is not to distract the prisoners from their situation, but to ask them to go deeper into its causes, details, and consequences. Known for her ability to get women to talk about things that would normally go unspoken, Ensler began her work at Bedford by creating a safe and challenging context for the inmates to explore the circumstances that had led them to prison. Her writing exercises ask the inmates to describe their crimes, explain scars on their bodies, answer a question that had gone unanswered, write to someone they love. The results are stunningly genuine and dramatic renderings of lives gone astray. As she listened to their stories, she came to realize that these women were more than just the crimes they committed; they were mothers, daughters, sisters, teachers, Jews, Christians, Muslims, high-school dropouts, PhD. candidates, barely 21, pushing 60, barely conscious of their crimes, remorseful to the point of suicide. What resulted was a writing community that has flourished for over five years and continues to this day, due, in large part, to the remarkable trust the inmates place in Ensler. It has given rise to several theatrical performances of the inmates' writing, arranged by Ensler and playwright Gary Sunshine, which have been presented at the prison and at various venues outside, including a benefit at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. Some of the country's top actors, including Mary Alice, Zoe Caldwell, Glenn Close, Ruby Dee, Hazelle Goodman, Marybeth Hurt, Phylicia Rashad, Rosie Perez, and Marisa Tomei have donated their time and talent to these performances, some of which have raised significant funds for the prison’s college education program.
With the cooperation of Bedford Superintendent Elaine Lord, Directors of Photography Dyanna Taylor (Common Threads) and Paul Gibson (Paris Is Burning) began to shoot sessions of Ensler's group, as well as performances. The inmates themselves, who reflect the vast political, economic, racial, and educational diversity of the prison population, quickly learned to participate in the group as if the cameras were not present.
Judith Katz, Executive Producer/Producer. Judith Katz has covered theater, looking for properties and talent suitable for film consideration for several film studios, including Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Universal, as well as independent producers. Ms. Katz is also the author of several nonfiction books and articles about the entertainment industry including The Working Actor, co-authored with Katinka Matson. Ms. Katz is a member of the faculty of the New School University in New York, where she teaches classes on working in the film industry. Since visiting Eve Ensler's writing class at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility and conceiving the idea for the film and producing it, she has started, along with Melissa Newman, a theater workshop within the prison. Gary Sunshine, Writer/Co-Producer. Gary Sunshine's plays have been seen at MCC Theater, New York Theater Workshop, New York Stage & Film, Cherry Lane Alternative, the Actors Studio, Underwood Theater, the Flea, the Directors Company, the Arts Theatre (UK) and HERE Arts Center. His plays have been published in a series of books including The Best American Short Plays of 2001, Perfect Ten, and Monologues for Men by Men. He is a resident playwright at New Dramatists. He received an A.B. from Princeton University and an M.F.A. from New York University’s Dramatic Writing Program. This is his first film. Madeleine Gavin, Editor/Co-Producer. Madeleine Gavin has edited numerous documentaries and features including Jordan Melamed's upcoming IFC Films Release, Manic, the Grand Jury prize winner at Sundance in 1997; Sunday; and the award-winning Inside Out. She was editor and second unit director of Signs and Wonders, starring Stellan Skarsgaard and Charlotte Rampling and has produced and edited several documentaries for television. Currently, Gavin is directing a documentary on women over the age of 60 and sexuality. She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley and her M.F.A from New York University, where she taught for three years. Paul Gibson, Cinematographer. Paul Gibson has served as Director of Photography on several award-winning documentaries including Paris Is Burning, Soul in the Hole, Execution Protocol, and Hail the New Puritan. Dyanna Taylor, Cinematographer. Dyanna Taylor's first nationally recognized documentary was Annapurna: A Woman's Place. Among her many cinematography credits are the Oscar-winner Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. Taylor is a 1998 recipient of the New York Women In Film and Television (NYWIFT) Muse Award for Outstanding Vision & Achievement and a 2001 Peabody Award recipient for F. Scott Fitzgerald: Winter Dreams.
Eve Ensler, Executive Producer. Eve Ensler’s Obie-Award-winning play, The Vagina Monologues, translated into 22 languages and running in theaters all over the world, including current sold-out runs at both Off-Broadway's Westside Theater and on London's West End (2002 Olivier Award nomination, Best Entertainment), initiated V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. Ensler's performance in The Vagina Monologues can be seen in the recently released HBO film and DVD. Her play Necessary Targets, set in a Bosnian refugee camp, opened Off-Broadway at the Variety Arts Theater in February 2002, after a hit run at Hartford Stage. Ensler is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in Playwriting, the Berrilla-Kerr Award for Playwriting, the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, and the Jury Award for Theater at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, as well as the 2002 Amnesty International Media Spotlight Award for Leadership, and The Matrix Award (2002) presented by New York Women in Communications, Inc. (NYWICI).
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Documentary Description
In the climax of the film, the writers, sitting among 300 of their
fellow inmates in a sea of khaki green, listen as their own words
are read by the actors. The camera cuts back and forth between
the performer and the writer, creating a complex dialogue that
underscores the painful and necessary role the writing process
has come to play in the inmates’ struggle with their own
guilt and responsibility.