The work all comes from a psychological need. See the images that I make... It's really a psychological need. I'm just jerked around by it. I'm pulled by it.

I always felt that when I was photographing, I had a psychic need to see this, to photograph this. And I think if somebody else had been doing this work, and if I could have seen these pictures anywhere at all, then there would have been no need to make them.

I just happened to have my camera and be photographing my friends. It was totally innocent; there was no purpose to the photographs. There was a purity to them that wasn’t planned; it was realism.

The work all comes from a psychological need. See the images that I make... It's really a psychological need. I'm just jerked around by it. I'm pulled by it.

When I was growing up, all the films about teenagers were played by Tony Curtis or John Cassavetes when they were 27, 28 years old. We would see these teenage movies in the theaters and I would say, "They don't look like they're my age at all." So I wanted to make a movie that was real and I wanted to make a movie that wasn't about me.

I think the reason why I never wanted to do a retrospective is because I was scared to go back and look at all this stuff through the years.

I've always been interested in people that you wouldn't see otherwise. If you look back at my books, photographs, and films-and since I'm doing this retrospective I've been forced to look back-the work is always about a small group of people who are somewhat isolated, and who you would never see if I didn't film or photograph them.