My first book, Fast Forward, was about growing up in the shadow of Hollywood and how kids are affected by the culture of materialism and the cult of celebrity, and I've often felt the reason my work has an audience in the UK is because it's everything the British love to hate about the Americans.

All my film ideas and subjects have come from photography.

I've often looked at the extremes as a way to shed light on the mainstream. Even though everybody says, "Money doesn't buy you happiness," I don't think that that's the principle by which people live. If you talk to kids and ask them what they want to be when they grow up, they say, "Rich and famous," but being rich and famous is not a job.

I've been a documentary photographer for much longer than I have been a filmmaker.

The 1970s were the height of social mobility. College was accessible. My grandfather was a poor immigrant who went to a public school in Ohio, and my father went to Harvard. That wasn't unusual. There was a feeling that anything was possible and you didn't have to be born into money to have a successful life. Now, people don't believe in the idea that anything is possible. We have more inequality than we've had ever before and a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.

The economist Juliet Schor talks about how our reference group has changed over the last twenty-five years. As we spend less time with our neighbors, we're spending more time with people we know from TV and social media, and this becomes our new reference group. The media is full of images of people with wealth, and we're comparing ourselves to them and aspiring to what they have. Instead of keeping up with the Joneses family, we're trying to keep up with the Kardashians, even though it's completely unrealistic.

During the Reagan eighties, the idea that money was a good thing - it was good to be rich; that wealth was a reflection of your character. We see this today in perceptions of Donald Trump: the idea that money is an expression of success and even goodness. I compare that with my dad's generation, where the American Dream was about giving your kids a better life, but not just in material terms. The American Dream was also about doing something good in the world. The home was at the center of the dream, but home also represented community, shelter, and stability for your family.