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For me, moving from photography to film was very easy.
Ultimately, the film [Dream of Life] is inspirational.
I quickly realized that Patti [Smith] was somebody very special.
I never went to film school, so I just sort of learned on my own.
I just wanted to be Patti's [Smith] messenger and get her word out there.
Fashion's been really good to me. It financed Patti Smith: Dream of Life.
For me to see the film [Dream of Life] on a big screen - it's pretty extraordinary.
The only self-consciousness in the film [Dream of Life] is anyone's natural shyness.
I was making a film [Dream of Life] about Patti [Smith], but I was taking pictures, too.
I shot [Dream of Life] all on 16-millimeter, and I just wanted to learn about Patti [Smith].
I didn't do well in high school, but I took photography, and I loved being able to capture moments.
I became Patti's [Smith] messenger, basically, and the film is my view of how I learned about Patti.
Many of my family members are teachers in the arts, and I picked up the camera years ago, in high school.
When I went to Detroit, I was very naïve, actually, and I think Patti [Smith] picked up on that quite quickly.
I took pictures of the objects and artifacts that Patti [Smith] would show to her friends because I wanted to document them.
Sometimes my fashion pictures can look a little bit like documentary style pictures. So having a camera in my hand was normal.
At the beginning I didn't even really think about making a movie [Dream of Life]. I was just thinking of documenting somebody.
Hopefully I can inspire lots of people to learn about [Patti Smith], to read poetry or learn about William Blake or Arthur Rimbaud.
I like not knowing too much about somebody I'm photographing, because the process also becomes an experience for me to learn about .
Fashion has also been a great outlet, and I'd like to do more fashion photography in the future. I also photograph a lot of artists.
We just grew to trust each other [with Patti Smith] more and more over the years. Most of the time I didn't even have a movie camera.
She let me in during her tour, in London. Her band members - especially Lenny Kaye - were shocked at the fact that I was filming Patti [Smith].
I do remember, the first time we met [with Patti Smith], the door opening with a squeak. And then there was this very beautiful girl looking out.
Patti [Smith] was my experiment, to be honest. And the film is what we got out of it. At the end of the day, I learned a lot about how to make a film.
We had a hodgepodge of footage. We didn't film [in Dream of Life ]all the time - we would just film periodically, so nothing was synced and nothing was slated.
Because the filming process was so organic and there was no script, the film [Dream of Life] was literally telling us what it wanted to be in the editing room.
We were just hanging out and getting to learn about each other. But I think trust was a really big thing. Patti [Smith] is a good friend, somebody I can talk to.
I came up with more money, took all the footage, got a great editor and made this film [Dream of Life]. But I really didn't go into it with the intention of making a movie.
I would bring Patti [Smith ] in to the editing room [working on the Dream of Life] and say, "This is a great moment for a voiceover, or a poem," and then we'd bring in some sound design.
Angelo Corrao was our editor [in Dream of Life], and he was just so diligent and so old-school in the way he looked at editing. He would take my far-out ideas and tame them and make sense of them.
[Through the making of Dream of Life] I learned about being patient, perseverance, having a dream, a goal. I learned that I can accomplish something despite not knowing anything about it when I begin.
I wasn't familiar with Patti [Smith ]much at all. When I was asked to photograph her, my wife said, "Oh my God, Patti Smith!" So I looked at some Robert Mapplethorpe books and I recognized those pictures.
It took 12 years to put this film [Dream of Life] together, but it was not until toward the end of those 12 years that I looked at Patti [Smith] and said, "Maybe we should do something with this footage."
The editing process was a free-for-all, and since I hadn't gone to film [Dream of Life] school or anything like that, I just said, "We'll do this. We'll do that." It was a really great experience that way.
When I started photographing Patti [Smith], I knew that there wasn't a whole a lot of information out there about her. I was periodically interested in films, and so I just kept asking her if I could come around.
That was an amazing experience [making Dream of Life]. It's hard to imagine that we were editing every day for a year. And it was pretty extraordinary; it also went by super fast. But every day was an experiment.
There are a lot of layers in the film [Dream of Life]. And during editing we would try to tame all the layers, try to make things a little bit more understood. We would move scenes around. We'd try all these things.
A lot of times I had footage that didn't have sound [in the Dream of Life film] - either I didn't bring a sound recorder, or I forgot to turn on the sound recorder - so we would have to improvise and build those scenes.
The film [Dream of Life] came together when we started editing; it was organic, it became nonlinear and it was its own animal. And I didn't want to tame it, either. I wanted it to be different. It's not your typical documentary.
I think those moments in Patti's [Smith] bedroom really helped the film [Dream of Life] out, and those moments existed because of the trust between us. There isn't any real self-consciousness in the film because we all like each other.
[Some] times I'd have sound but no image. When Patti [Smith] was singing with her guitar, or doing something amazing with her clarinet, I'd just mess around and record the sound. So we'd use those sounds as another layer in the film [Dream of Life].
I remember when we were at Sundance, we were in Robert Redford's screening room, and I had never seen the film look so beautiful or sound so great. It was really big and really powerful, and I had a sense of accomplishment in finishing a project like this.
I didn't do well in high school, but I took photography, and I loved being able to capture moments. It led to more and more photography, and fashion was the angle into photography for me. It was incredible to see photographs by Irving Penn or Helmut Newton. I was really intrigued by that, and that's what led me to New York City.
I thought about how to film something, how to take pictures of it and how to mix it all together. And I was getting that through Patti [Smith] - because she takes pictures, performs, writes; she does so many things, and that was a big inspiration to me. It helped me realized that I'm not just a fashion photographer. I wanted to do all these other artistic things as well, and during filming my mind opened up to those possibilities.
Over time it just got more and more intense as far as the trust factor. For example, when we started editing the film [Dream of Life], I thought, man, I need to make sense of all the footage I have; I need to ground the film. And one day I was hanging out in Patti's [Smith] bedroom, which is where Patti works, and in the corner of her bedroom is this great chair, and that's when she began showing her personal things to me. The camera was there, and we realized that we were really making the movie and making sense of the footage in the movie.