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.

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

The only self-consciousness in the film [Dream of Life] is anyone's natural shyness.

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

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 thought about how to film something, how to take pictures of it and how to mix it all together. And I was getting that through Patti [Smith] - because she takes pictures, performs, writes; she does so many things, and that was a big inspiration to me. It helped me realized that I'm not just a fashion photographer. I wanted to do all these other artistic things as well, and during filming my mind opened up to those possibilities.

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