Paul Haggis on the importance of passion

I’d tell new writers, “Write your passion. Don’t listen to your agents. Don’t listen to your friends who tell you that the studio is looking for this thing, that actor’s looking for this thing. Don’t listen to them. You’ll waste your time!” I wasted years and years chasing things like that. “Columbia is looking for a ghost story!”—so I spent months and months coming up with ghost stories. They didn’t know what they were looking for. I wasted a lot of time, and I didn’t succeed until very late in my career when I decided to write Crash and Million Dollar Baby because these stories deeply affected or troubled me. And they took four and a half years to sell. But they sold. And they got made. I think I’ve only succeeded when I’ve done things I was really passionate about.

—Paul Haggis, quoted in Making a Good Script Great