I took pictures of the objects and artifacts that Patti [Smith] would show to her friends because I wanted to document them.
I didn't do well in high school, but I took photography, and I loved being able to capture moments.
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 .
I quickly realized that Patti [Smith] was somebody very special.
I do remember, the first time we met [with Patti Smith], the door opening with a squeak. And then there was this very beautiful girl looking out.
When I started photographing Patti [Smith], I knew that there wasn't a whole a lot of information out there about her. I was periodically interested in films, and so I just kept asking her if I could come around.
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].
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.
The only self-consciousness in the film [Dream of Life] is anyone's natural shyness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of times I had footage that didn't have sound [in the Dream of Life film] - either I didn't bring a sound recorder, or I forgot to turn on the sound recorder - so we would have to improvise and build those scenes.
I would bring Patti [Smith ] in to the editing room [working on the Dream of Life] and say, "This is a great moment for a voiceover, or a poem," and then we'd bring in some sound design.
[Some] times I'd have sound but no image. When Patti [Smith] was singing with her guitar, or doing something amazing with her clarinet, I'd just mess around and record the sound. So we'd use those sounds as another layer in the film [Dream of Life].
There are a lot of layers in the film [Dream of Life]. And during editing we would try to tame all the layers, try to make things a little bit more understood. We would move scenes around. We'd try all these things.
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.
When I went to Detroit, I was very naïve, actually, and I think Patti [Smith] picked up on that quite quickly.
"I just wanted to be Patti's [Smith] messenger and get her word out there."
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