More thoughts, via writer Marisa Silver, on inner vs. outer impetus as it relates to creativity:
"I was not a writer in New York. I was a young filmmaker with a low-budget independent film called 'Old Enough' under my belt that was very much a New York story and one rooted in autobiography. I moved to Los Angeles to continue to pursue filmmaking, which I did for a while. I took on projects that I liked very much, but whose stories did not begin with some impulse within me. I found myself working hard to graft myself onto foreign ideas, trying to infuse them with emotions or themes that were meaningful to me. I had varying degrees of success, but for the most part, the more I worked on films for the studios, the more I felt that I was telling stories that had nothing to do with what I really felt about human nature, about how we live."