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After 2000 or so, I started to realize I wanted to be doing something else. I didn't want to be in front of a camera. I was frustrated. I didn't think I would stop acting, but I didn't want to be seen.

When I was little, I had this old video camera, and I set it up, and I would pretend that I was on comedy shows and soap operas and things like that.

I knew from the first moment I picked up a camera, on my first school assignment, what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was going to find a way to travel the world and tell the stories of the people I met through photographs.

Growing up, my sisters and I would always talk stories. One of my frustrations was I didn't know anything about cameras. I didn't know how to make a film and I obviously didn't have a special effects budget. I was a kid. So I was learning to draw to get down the stuff that was in my head, that I couldn't afford to actually do.

I was a loser in high school.

When I made my first film, I had hardly ever seen a camera before, and I was a young man when I arrived in Paris from the suburbs. At the time, I didn't talk much. I was very shy, so the bluff served me. I was telling people that I had no money, and that I knew how to make films, but I had no proof.

I'd grab the camera and tell people what to do, and when I was 14, someone told me that it was called directing.

When I was fifteen years old, my dad won a video camera in a corporate golf tournament. I snatched it from his closet and began filming skateboard videos with my friends.

I avoided the spotlight when I was a kid. I always knew, 'Hey, it wasn't me. I didn't do anything.' If there was a camera around, I hid from it.

I grew up as a photo nut. Every Christmas I would get a new camera. It's a huge part of my life.