David Marchese

So you've been trying to make The Chronology of Water for, I think it's close to 10 years.

And it's a memoir that...

involves a lot of really heavy stuff.

You know, there's addiction, child abuse, the loss of an infant.

I'm just wondering, when you first read the book, what was it about that material that made you feel like this was a story that you had to tell?

You opened up a lot of doors with that answer, so let's start going through some of them.

But I think you said that your interest in the material wasn't necessarily so much about the particulars of Lydia's experience as it was the way that the writing invited you to sort of examine the particulars of your own experience, right?

And I just wonder if you can kind of make that concrete a little bit.

I think an idea that I was thinking about as I was watching the film was the relationship between one's own experience and sort of the emotionally intense experiences of, in this case, the author.

But I think kind of what I hear you saying is that my question is maybe a little bit irrelevant.

That was a very elegant and impassioned way of...

Saying, nice question, dummy.

No, not at all.

This is a total naive question, but why does it take eight years to make a movie like this?

It's not like a giant special effects movie or a bunch of locations all over the world or something.

It seems like an unusually long time.

Maybe it's not in your business, but what's going on?

I think you were just talking about, in a way, the idea of Lydia's sense of abandon.

That could be sexual abandon, creative abandon, abandon when it comes to drinking or drug use, abandon with relationships.

You know...