Carter studied at Texas A&M and Rice, switching from engineering to drama in midstream; both disciplines served him well in the seat-of-the-pants world of independent filmmaking. He considers himself fortunate to have studied under Pulitzer-winning black playwright Charles Gordone, but eventually found the world of writing for the stage too confining and decided to make the switch over to screen. He sees a major problem in the current Hollywood mindset of over-reliance on focus groups, market research, demographics, etc., often to the detriment of honest storytelling. It's a problem especially visited on the world of black filmmaking; Carter wants to avoid having Fifth Ward lumped in with all the other "hood" films and sees black filmmakers as being too readily pigeonholed by audiences and the film industry alike. That's compounded by critics who, grasping for a handy frame of reference, use such phrases as "the next Mario Van Peebles" or "the next John Singleton," but hardly ever "the next Robert Aldrich" or "the next Don Siegel."