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 like not knowing too much about somebody I'm photographing, because the process also becomes an experience for me to learn about .

Hopefully I can inspire lots of people to learn about [Patti Smith], to read poetry or learn about William Blake or Arthur Rimbaud.

When I went to Detroit, I was very naïve, actually, and I think Patti [Smith] picked up on that quite quickly.

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

At the beginning I didn't even really think about making a movie [Dream of Life]. I was just thinking of documenting somebody.

I never went to film school, so I just sort of learned on my own.