Fashion has also been a great outlet, and I'd like to do more fashion photography in the future. I also photograph a lot of artists.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I didn't do well in high school, but I took photography, and I loved being able to capture moments. It led to more and more photography, and fashion was the angle into photography for me. It was incredible to see photographs by Irving Penn or Helmut Newton. I was really intrigued by that, and that's what led me to New York City.

I wasn't familiar with Patti [Smith ]much at all. When I was asked to photograph her, my wife said, "Oh my God, Patti Smith!" So I looked at some Robert Mapplethorpe books and I recognized those pictures.