A Life's Work

Product Information

What are your personal experiences putting on all these hats/responsibilities (simultaneously)? Tell us about story, writing, and production? First of all there was a letter, from a writer friend I had sent a copy to. Be prepared, she said: your book is going to make people very angry.

If everyone were to read this book," it said, "the propagation of the human race would virtually cease, which would be a shame." The reviewer was a woman. I had met her, in fact, at some literary festival or other years before. She had seemed harmless enough: I would not have suspected her of such drastic reach, such annihilating middle-class smugness ("which would be a shame"). She went on to accuse me of "confining [my daughter] to the kitchen like an animal". Perhaps strangely, it was the second remark that troubled me more than the possibility that humanity would be extinguished by my hand. How did this person presume to know what I did with my daughter, and where? Where had she come upon such bizarre information? Had someone told her I treated my child like an animal? It took me a long time to realise that her accusation came from the book itself, from a falsification of its personal material. She had searched it, I saw, for "evidence" of my conduct as a mother, and as such she could permit herself to misrepresent me, for she was not judging the book as a book. She was judging it as a social situation.Cusk and her family move from London to a university town. She encounters older parents and a more patriarchal culture. Her new acquaintances all ask her, “What does your husband do?” After a disastrous visit to a playgroup at which both Cusk and her baby find themselves bullied by their peers, Cusk rebels against the fact that “conscription to the world of orthodox parenthood demands all the self-abnegation, the surrender to conformity, the relish for the institutional, that the term implies…Here the restaurants had high chairs and changing facilities, the buses wide doors and recesses for prams.” When did you form your production company – and what was the original motivation for its formation? In a brief introduction, Cusk notes that the memoir was written just six months after her first daughter’s birth and while Cusk was pregnant with her second daughter. Her husband enabled her to write by quitting his job to take care of both children while she finished the book. Every morning I cycle with my daughters to school: it is a good 10-minute ride, uphill most of the way. We used to go on the pavement, but people protested so now we go on the road. Every single day, some woman with her child strapped into the front seat of her car shakes her head at us. Today, a woman in a Range Rover pulled up at a junction where we had stopped, and rolled down her window. "You're making me very nervous," she said to me loudly. I looked at her, at the child sitting beside her. Did she not care that my daughters could hear what she said? Did they not exist for her, panting and proud of their cycling, stridently moral about pollution? Could she not see that it was she, in her car, that represented the very danger she congratulated herself for pointing out? She was so certain that she was protecting her child better than I was protecting mine. I will never defeat that certainty. All I can do is endeavour not to be crushed by it.

DL:Exceptional cinematographers. Andy and Wolfgang have that gift few people have: they instinctively know (after many years of experience) what to shoot, where to put the camera, and how to light the shot. I read this sitting in the foot-high summer grass that grew through the terrace, above a wild sea of rhododendron bushes. I didn't know what to make of it. Which people? Why would they be angry? What did it have to do with them? A day or two later my sister called. Don't listen to anything they say, she said. It's a very good book. Just ignore them. Frankly, you are a self-obsessed bore: the embodiment of the Me! Me! Me! attitude which you so resent in small children. And everything those children say or do is - in your mind - really about you. Sooner or later, you end up in family therapy, because it has never occurred to you that it might be an idea to simply bring children up to be happy, or to consider happiness as an option for yourself ... Talk about navel-gazing." DL:I have a short documentary I’d like to make. The pandemic is trying to make sure the film never gets made. Paolo Soleri, controversial architect behind Arcosanti, a town designed to test his theories about housing an overpopulated planet while also preserving, and nurturing, the natural environment; and Jeff Stein, AIA, Soleri’s mentee at Arcosanti in the 1970s and his successor after his death in 2013. Fittingly, the film begins with Soleri and ends with Stein ruminating about his mentor and what it means to carry on a legacy. Andy Bowley (L) and David Licata (R) working on A Life’s WorkI have about as much interest in babies as I have in cavity-wall insulation. You might feel moved to describe the moments of desperation that follow nine hours of incessant wailing. David Licata (DL):I became excited by the idea in 2004, Wolfgang and I began shooting in 2005, Andy and I shot the final interview in 2017. I spent 2017 to 2019 editing and fundraising for post-production. The film was completed in 2020.

DL:Marketing is very important; without it how would people see your film? I’ve always thought of film festivals as the best marketing tool for an independent film. I think it is a rare independent project that succeeds without showing at film festivals. What is the source of the idea? How did the story develop from the idea? And how did the story evolve into a screenplay? Why do this story? Do you have a writing process? It might not occur to you that, just because it's a horrific experience doesn't make it interesting. If you had a baby, you did so because you wanted one. If you are suffering sleep deprivation so severe you're hallucinating, that was your choice."Compounding all this is sleeplessness. For month after month, Cusk cannot sleep through the night. Soon the “muddled nights began to attain an insomniac clarity. My insides grew gritty, my nerves sharp…I no longer slept in the intervals, but merely rested silently like some legendary figure, itinerant, doughty, and far from home. The reservoir of sleep I had accumulated through my life had run dry. I was living off air and adrenalin. Mercury ran through my veins." DL:The first interview was the most difficult, with the architect Paolo Soleri. The film is about people who will not complete their work in their lifetime, and I had heard from a few people that Soleri became angry when he was asked, “when will Arcosanti be finished?” And yet, I had to ask. I hemmed and hawed, and he shook his head and with an “I knew it” smile on his face, said, “That’s the end of the interview.” We both laughed and he graciously evaded answering and we continued the interview.