It’s there through history. Renaissance painters usually painted what they were told to paint. After all, Michelangelo didn’t want to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He didn’t want to paint anything; he was a sculptor who thought painting was an inferior art form.

Shakespeare had to fill theatres. If the audience weren’t laughing, or groaning, or gasping, they weren’t going to come back. Their tastes might have been ghoulish and sensational but Shakespeare was able to fulfil those appetites and still prove himself a peerless poet and dramatist.

Perhaps the best example is Keith Jarrett’s Cologne concert of 1975. Arriving on the day of the concert, Jarrett was stuck with a substandard piano that drastically narrowed his options in a way he couldn’t have anticipated and would never normally accept: the upper and lower registers were poor and the pedals didn’t even work. For some reason he eventually went ahead with the gig and the subsequent recording is a classic in jazz history. The story is fantastically told – along with Eno & Bowie’s deliberate attempts to throw artificial constraints into their own process – by Tim Harford here.

So while it’s natural to think of an artist as starting with a blank canvas and thinking; ‘What is my inspiration bidding me to create today?’, that’s not how it usually happens. In reality, they might need to have an eye on what sells. They might not have all the colours on the palette that they could. A dancer might be carrying an injury. A theatre director arrives at the venue where the play will be formed and discovers that the stage is too small, or too big, or only has one entrance onto the stage.

This is even more true of film-makers. You might not get the weather. You might lose the light. The animal (or the actor) doesn’t respond to its handler.

Take Francis Ford Coppola, halfway into filming the most expensive (at the time) film of all time, way over budget and schedule, propped up by his own money, and stuck out in The Philippines. He’s already fired his original lead actor, Harvey Keitel. It’s hard for anyone who’s seem the final film to imagine Keitel playing the part of Willard. Clearly, Coppola found it hard to imagine too. Keitel’s replacement, Martin Sheen, drunkenly smashed a mirror on set and gashed his wrist. Luckily, they caught that on camera and it’s in the movie. Sheen’s near-fatal heart attack some time later almost sank the project.

But that’s not the VOON; that’s just background. The VOON was when Marlon Brando turned up, hugely overweight. His character is supposed to be elite special forces. To get round it, Coppola shot Brando almost entirely in darkness. The audience has been waiting through the whole film to see the legendary character of Kurtz – and now he is only seen in tantalising glimpses, adding to the mystique.

I used to believe that I was more of an artist when I brought to life something that had previously been conceived in my head. I don’t think so now. I think it’s about how you play the hand you’re dealt.

And that means every aspect of the process: the state of the industry, the economy, audience tastes, the difficulty of marketing a film without a hook, however good the film is.

So with each new obstacle, constraint, and frustration, the challenge is not just ‘How do I make art out of that?’ but ‘How do I make BETTER art BECAUSE of that?’. To me, that’s the ultimate test of creativity and the ultimate challenge.