Angelo 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.

I was making a film [Dream of Life] about Patti [Smith], but I was taking pictures, too.

Patti [Smith] was my experiment, to be honest. And the film is what we got out of it. At the end of the day, I learned a lot about how to make a film.

I became Patti's [Smith] messenger, basically, and the film is my view of how I learned about Patti.

Because the filming process was so organic and there was no script, the film [Dream of Life] was literally telling us what it wanted to be in the editing room.

I came up with more money, took all the footage, got a great editor and made this film [Dream of Life]. But I really didn't go into it with the intention of making a movie.

That was an amazing experience [making Dream of Life]. It's hard to imagine that we were editing every day for a year. And it was pretty extraordinary; it also went by super fast. But every day was an experiment.