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."
Steven SebringAngelo 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.
Steven SebringThe 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.
Steven SebringOver 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.
Steven Sebring