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.

The editing process was a free-for-all, and since I hadn't gone to film [Dream of Life] school or anything like that, I just said, "We'll do this. We'll do that." It was a really great experience that way.

She let me in during her tour, in London. Her band members - especially Lenny Kaye - were shocked at the fact that I was filming Patti [Smith].

Sometimes my fashion pictures can look a little bit like documentary style pictures. So having a camera in my hand was normal.

The film [Dream of Life] came together when we started editing; it was organic, it became nonlinear and it was its own animal. And I didn't want to tame it, either. I wanted it to be different. It's not your typical documentary.

Over time it just got more and more intense as far as the trust factor. For example, when we started editing the film [Dream of Life], I thought, man, I need to make sense of all the footage I have; I need to ground the film. And one day I was hanging out in Patti's [Smith] bedroom, which is where Patti works, and in the corner of her bedroom is this great chair, and that's when she began showing her personal things to me. The camera was there, and we realized that we were really making the movie and making sense of the footage in the movie.

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.