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

You have these relationships with people that you care about, but I also try to stick to my job as filmmaker and be fair and truthful about what I saw and my experience of the people, hopefully informed by a deep understanding of them.

I'm also looking for the psychological elements that fuel commodity culture. For example, if we imbue girls with deep insecurity about their bodies through images of an impossible ideal, we create a really vulnerable and avid consumer. If somebody feels that they're not OK without a certain product, you have a very deep and loyal market that will come back to the product again and again. Sometimes, this process is both rational and irrational.

I've also been documenting an unsustainable way of life. And you see in peoples' stories that this world of consumerism does not support the moral and spiritual values - of family and community - that people feel are most important. From an environmental perspective, the quest for more and more is not going to be possible on this planet. This is a historical documentation of an unsustainable path, and my hope is that this work allows people to think about their own agency and the potential for change.

I've long been interested in looking at the culture of consumerism and also was interested in this connection between the American dream and the house, and the house being kind of the ultimate expression of self and success.

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.

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.