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? 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 Work

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. Another review, in a different paper: this one long and articulate where the first was brief and blunt. 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." 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.” 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.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. 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?”

How important is marketing? Talk about the festival tour? Do you think a project can make a dent without it nowadays? David Licata (DL):Wearing so many hats was frustrating, and I often wished I had an assistant. But just as often wearing all those hats was a valuable learning experience. I was forced to communicate deeply and personally with so many people, and so many different kinds of people–academics, farmers, geneticists, astronomers, architects, city planners, record collectors, DJs, antiquities experts, students, ministers, singers, to name a few. I learned a lot from each of them about their particular fields, and I learned a lot about how to talk with all kinds of people. Paolo Soleri and David Licata in A Life’s Work directed by David LicataDL: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 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? 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." When did you form your production company – and what was the original motivation for its formation?