Fashion's been really good to me. It financed Patti Smith: Dream of Life.

I remember when we were at Sundance, we were in Robert Redford's screening room, and I had never seen the film look so beautiful or sound so great. It was really big and really powerful, and I had a sense of accomplishment in finishing a project like this.

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

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

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.

We had a hodgepodge of footage. We didn't film [in Dream of Life ]all the time - we would just film periodically, so nothing was synced and nothing was slated.