I am always amazed that film students are always stuck for ideas or change their ideas for projects mid stream. They need to look at life, at people, at the human condition and relationships to find the stories they want to tell. But the problem is that most film students never look at themselves to find their stories. When I was in high school and writing compositions for English class my high school English teacher, Mr. Farkas would say, "write about you and what you know!" At the time I thought that I needed to write about what I thought people thought I knew.

It didn’t hit me until college that what he meant was write about the things in life that you know about and are passionate about. If it means something close to you, then write about it. Well in the biz we tell stories the same way and we should be making the projects about something we are passionate about or that we know about. That doesn’t change.

Coppola knew about the people that populated THE GODFATHER, Oliver Stone made PLATOON from his memories. Everyone has a story or two. We can see that even in the reality shows like Big Brother, or Fear Factor. That’s why we are glued to the sets watching these voyeuristic shows. We watch them and see past the moment to the story and makeup of each of the characters. So producers should look to themselves for the projects not looking for projects that are "like" another project. And believe in them. Even though distributors (who lack imagination by the way) are always looking for that copycat movie, if you continue forward with passion and drive and believe in the project, it will get made.