When I first moved from photography to filmmaking, I was worried about how big I had to become. I was one person, or maybe me and an assistant, and I had these small cameras, and maybe a flash.

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.

What I'm documenting can be hard to distill, because it's all around us like the air we breathe. I often need to go to a place where I can capture extreme moments.

The people in the popular group say there is no peer pressure because they are at the top of the food chain. Really what they are doing is just eating away at everybody else.

Race is a huge factor when it comes to income and social inequality, and it plays a role in the structural barriers you are talking about. But when you're in the upper echelon of the 1 percent - even though it's certainly a more white demographic overall - there are fewer barriers.

My photography is often a sociological look at American culture and it's been very well published in the UK.

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.