Helen Levitt: I was born in Brooklyn, in Bensonhurst, and lived there with my family. My father came from Lithuania when he was about 16, my mother's father came from Poltava which is near Kiev. My mother was born here. My grandmother lived across the street, and my uncle lived in her house. We had a big house, backyard and flowers — it was like living in a small town.

Sybil Miller: In Ben Maddow's film Storm of Strangers, there were a couple of lines I thought were relevant to your work. At one point he says, "Forget geography, don't study maps, study faces." And another: "Every child is born beautiful and smart, so let them grow up beautiful and smart, don't stand in their way." Actually that line could be from your film The Quiet One, a moving film, beautifully done.

HL: Well, the commentary's very good.

SM: In that film, you had a lot of different roles, you were writer, photographer and editor as well.

HL: I was not THE writer or THE photographer, we all did a little bit of everything, except Richard Bagley, who did most of the photography, not me. I did a little bit, but he did the greater part.

SM: What inspired you to make The Quiet One?

HL: My friend Janice Loeb, who later married my brother, she had been painting and was stuck, and didn't want to go on painting, and I said, let's make a movie. And she came from parents who had some money, they were not really wealthy, but they were better off than most people, and she always tried to support different things that they believed in. And in