Many of my family members are teachers in the arts, and I picked up the camera years ago, in high school.

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

Many of my family members are teachers in the arts, and I picked up the camera years ago, in high school.

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.

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.

We just grew to trust each other [with Patti Smith] more and more over the years. Most of the time I didn't even have a movie camera.

I think those moments in Patti's [Smith] bedroom really helped the film [Dream of Life] out, and those moments existed because of the trust between us. There isn't any real self-consciousness in the film because we all like each other.