A Life's Work

Product Information

DL:I have a short documentary I’d like to make. The pandemic is trying to make sure the film never gets made.

Tell us why you chose to write, produce, direct, shoot, cut/edit the movie? Was it financial, chance, or no-budget reason? DL:Paolo Soleri was the first to agree to be in the film, and the first interview was with him, and the first footage was of Arcosanti. When did you form your production company – and what was the original motivation for its formation? The sun shines again: the shame goes away. After all, it seems that I have done something good, not bad. I even feel a certain pride, as a mother, that is. My writer-self feels nothing at all. It can't afford to.DL:I reached out to organizations and people who were associated with the four topics of the film: architecture, gospel music, astronomy, and arborists. And I reached out to the press that covered those topics, as well as the locales in which we shot. This resulted in a few people wanting to screen it for their organization or their school, and I love doing that just as much as screening at a festival. DL:We had about 30 shoot days, on average, 8-hour days per shoot day. I don’t like to work long days, and I don’t expect anyone else to. David Licata (DL):Over the 12 years of the shoot, two cinematographers, Andy Bowley and Wolfgang Held, coincidentally shot the same amount of footage each, about 50 hours, and the difference between them was something like 10 minutes. It’s because of the two of them that the film began and kept going. Wolfgang and I had worked on my previous film, Tango Octogenario, and when I shared the idea with him, he was intrigued and said he’d love to be involved. Andy’s enthusiasm for and positivity in the project sustained me and gave me the confidence to keep going, even after we finished production, maybe especially after production. Without them, I may have never finished shooting. 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. Another review, in a different paper: this one long and articulate where the first was brief and blunt.

David Licata (DL):I’m David Licata. I’m a filmmaker and a writer of fiction and nonfiction. I live on the Upper West Side of New York City. Pure misery to read. From the way she writes about her first child, God alone only knows how she allowed herself to bear a second."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. How important is marketing? Talk about the festival tour? Do you think a project can make a dent without it nowadays? 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:A Life’s Work didn’t really have a tight shooting schedule. The documentary had only my self-imposed deadlines. Jeff Stein on the set of A Life’s Work directed by David Licata 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.

What is really startling about A Life's Work is that it is genuinely post-feminist, not in the sense that we do not need feminism any more, but in the sense that it implicitly points to the holes in the familiar feminist discourse. If we do away with the notion that the personal is political, as feminism-lite is wont to do, who gets left holding the baby? This is the contemporary crisis of feminism. An equality founded on what Cusk might call public significance has produced an emphasis on work as the only measure of parity. Motherhood, as it is lived, is still individual, personal, private, and therefore deeply undervalued, sometimes even by those of us (and nowadays that is most of us) who move between the "real" world of work and the shadow world of family life. Between these worlds, Cusk has crafted a work of beauty and wisdom. And belly laughs. A lovely thing."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. 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. Cusk anatomises motherhood as Montaigne anatomised friendship or Robert Burton anatomised melancholy ... Some alchemy of her prose renders this most fascinating and boring of all subjects graceful, eloquent, modest and true." 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?

I 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. DL:After watching the film, I hope the viewer recognizes that the path of the subjects in the film is similar to their own, which I hope will prompt them to ask themselves “What will my legacy be?” 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." Financing: Grants from the Puffin Foundation, the Yip Harburg Foundation, Indiegogo fundraiser, and self.David Licata (DL): A Life’s Work is a documentary that asks the question. What’s it like to dedicate your life to work that won’t be completed in your lifetime? 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." 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. What are your personal experiences putting on all these hats/responsibilities (simultaneously)? Tell us about story, writing, and production? It was, perhaps, our isolation - idyllic though it was - that sealed these events in a profound melancholy from which I subsequently found myself unable to escape. The world became a bleaker place. I felt angry and defensive and violated. Despite the number of people who had praised and admired it, and the letters I received to that effect from readers, I regretted, constantly, the fact that I had written A Life's Work. I had been asked many times - am still asked - by journalists barely able to contain their excitement lest I say "yes", whether I regretted having my children. What meaning could such an admission possibly have? My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves. It is these kinds of questions that are the true heresy, not my refusal to answer them. But my books are my own, to approve of or regret as I see fit.