Timothy Greenfield-Sanders on HBO's The Latino List, Pitbull, and Andy Warhol

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: My new HBO film, "The Latino List" is a wide-ranging view of Latinos in the U.S. From Sonia Sotomayor to Pitbull to Eddie "Piolin" Sotelo, the documentary explores identity, achievement and struggle in a very intimate and personal way. Visually, I've taken my distinctive photographic portrait style ... a single light source, a plain grey backdrop and a focus on the subject's face and translated that to film.

"The Latino List" is a organic extension of my last three films for HBO, "The Black List" documentaries, which were about leading African Americans in the U.S. When we started those films in 2006, we always hoped that one day we would film Latinos in a similar way. About two years ago, Ingrid Duran, Catherine Pino, and Susan Gonzales, three Latinas who were fans of "The Black List" films met with us and we decided to partner on "The Latino List." They knew or had access to many of the subjects who ended up in the film. Others, like John Leguizamo, is a friend and I asked him to sit for the project. Christy Turlington, whom I have shot in the past, is in the portrait show at the Brooklyn Museum, the AT&T sponsored book, and will be in Volume 2 of the film -- when that happens.

My role model has always been Andy Warhol, who gave artists "permission" to break out of categories. He was a painter, a filmmaker, a publisher, a fashion model, a sculptor, a writer... he did it all and broke the mold that pigeonholed artists into just one artistic field. I've always loved film...I have an MFA in film from the American Film Institute...so it wasn't a giant leap for me when after years of taking portraits, I made my first doc, "Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart". What I have done that's special here and very rewarding to me is the combination of directing the films, producing them and taking portraits of all of the subjects.

I love documentaries. I don't have a desire to make narrative films... my younger daughter, Liliana Greenfield-Sanders does...so I'll leave that to her.

Documentaries like "The Black List" and "The Latino List" expose all of us to achievement and great accomplishment in areas that we to be less aware of. We all know the success stories of Barack Obama and Oprah and perhaps Sonia Sotomayor, but we don't know enough about people like Toni Morrison, or Cesar Conde, or Ralph de la Vega, or Marta Morena Vega, or Julie Stav.

I left Miami in 1970 when I graduated from Ransom School (before it was called Ransom Everglades!). I moved to New York and got my degree from Columbia University, so my Miami perspective is antique, to say the least. But I still have family in Miami and I still love the city. Miami is an ever-changing city and if you read its history, always has been. The Latino influence is just the latest "change." It has been enormous and it has brought great vitality to South Florida. I was going to say it made Miami sexy, but Miami was always sexy!