What are your personal experiences putting on all these hats/responsibilities (simultaneously)? Tell us about story, writing, and production? 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 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? 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. 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."

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. Tell us why you chose to write, produce, direct, shoot, cut/edit the movie? Was it financial, chance, or no-budget reason? 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." 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.” 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.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 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." 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: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 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: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. 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. 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?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."