Today we’d like to introduce you to Priscilla Avila. She and her team share her story with us below.
Please kick things off for us with some background on Priscilla’s story.
Priscilla is a Brazilian actress, writer, and director. She has appeared in several Brazilian plays, films, and Tv Shows, most notably as Stefani in 2017’s “171 Negocio de Familia” at Universal Channel Brazil. She speaks Portuguese, French, Spanish and English.
She was born in a very small city in Minas Gerais, Brazil, but she moved to several places from the Rio Grande do Sul to Bahia in her early years. Priscilla exposure to the world of acting came when she moved to Itabuna, Bahia. She began her career by appearing in several plays and commercials. Her debut in a theatre was when she was only 12 years old, and her first commercial was when she was 14 years old.
At 13, she got invited to be part of the theatre group of the City (TEG) and travels to multiple cities to join Theatre Festivals. Avila and her group won several awards with the plays they produced. At 15’s she was constantly acting, writing and selling paintings for the local market, a hobby that she discovered being lucrative. In 2001, she also joined the Theatre Group from the University of South of Bahia (UESC).
In spite of her theater career and commercials, Avila, pursuit her dream about movies appearing in some short movies in 2009 in Bahia, Brazil. As a young woman, she remained adamant also about her education. Studying Psychology and after changing her field for Foreign Languages, Culture and Creative Economy. She learned several languages in college and began to travel around the world to complement her acting skills. She did some acting training in Argentina, France and later in the US.
In 2012, she traveled to Paris to find some gigs. She appeared on TV in a famous music video from the movie of Les Kairas, and she was part of a short film with the French actress Esther Garrel. Despite her fast debut in the French industry, her visa status in France made her come back to Brazil in three months and moved to Sao Paulo to improve her cinema career.
While continuing her career in Brazil, Avila earned a post-degree in Cinema from a Brazilian University in Sao Paulo. She won also a scholarship for the Summer Art Course at Santa Fe University, NM in 2014 and it was her first time in the US. Avila’s increasingly intellectual and passionate approach to filmmaking culminated in her writing Brazilian scripts for film and one for a Tv show that’s still in production.
She was obstinate to write some good roles for herself in order to move her Brazilian acting career further, but her ambitious behavior made her come again to the US in 2017 and join some great workshops and meetings that ended up in Avila trying to move to Los Angeles in 2018. Now Priscilla Avila is determined to improve her English and become an International Actress.
Priscilla, let’s dig a little deeper into your story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It’s tough to have big dreams when you have such small opportunities in life. Your mind tells you to give up EVERY SINGLE day even if it´s for a fraction of a second. And when the road is so big, we can´t deny that we get tired a lot…
I grew up in a very small town in Brazil with very poor infrastructure and where culture and art are put outside for the people that plan and try to build some economic grown there. Once, when the political party changed in the city government, they closed the only theatre and cinema that we had. It was a very sad moment being a young actress with no opportunities and no place to study.
Brazil is a big country as the US, and for being successful, you have to move for a big City as Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. I had an extreme willingness to moving out of there, but when I finished school I was 17 years old, and I was in a state very far away from the big cities, and I got so afraid especially because my parents used to freak me out so much about the violence there that they saw every day on the newspapers.
That for sure didn’t help me to have the courage. But I had, as I told before, this strong will of living artistically, so I end up trying to go abroad plenty of times. In the beginning, I didn’t have money and visa to succeed with my plan. My First trip abroad I was 22, and I had a German friend, so I decided to go there, but he forgot that I was going there and traveled to Israel.
So I was trying to live there with strangers and trying not to be raped because I had a lot of men there saying they want to put me in a movie, but I was not so stupid at the time. I felt that it was so scammy, I end up traveling a lot anyway because I need to figure out a spot for working and move further careerwise.
When I finished College, I decided to move to Paris, but the sexual harassment was so strong that broke my heart to think about an international career again. They used to say ‘the Brazilian Girls do everything.’ When I finally moved to Sao Paulo, I faced the same issues, but I realized that the world never was fair for women and the only thing I can change is the way I look to the world. I decided to look and think positively.
Meanwhile, I have never stopped studying, and I was fascinated by the American approach about acting (Group Theatre and Actors Studio). I was desperate to have a job in a movie and to practice all the “method actings,” but I realized that is not easy when you don´t have an agent, friends, and connections. I was a ‘country girl.’
So the best way I thought of putting myself in the business was being close to the other fields that involve the industry. I did a master in Cinema, and I started working as an assistant director for a famous Brazilian stage director. I met many famous people.
When I try to build great connections for my career as a writer and director, I was also had to face the stigma of “pretty face and dumb.” Anyway, it has always been a very rough road for me and for a lot of people for sure, but many of them can try to buy a bulldozer to fix it. I´m buying mine now.
We’d love to hear more about what you do.
I have more than 20 years working as an actress in theatre and small projects, but I have never thought that I had ‘the job of my dreams.” Even after working on TV, I think I didn’t have a chance yet to be challenged as I was in some classes and trainings I had all those years. Besides any normal frustration a lot of actors in my age have faced, I created a company called Bougie Media once in Brazil to try to help friends with some scenes for their reels.
Bougie is ‘candle’ in French. It was a day that I really need a name for promoting a scene that I am shooting for helping an actress friend of mine. I wanted something with light in the name because movies are about lightning. An easy way of having light is from a candle. And Cinema is pure light. It’s an image made by photons and holds the moment for a long period even if the people and things are not here anymore. It’s not a person in flesh and blood. It’s not a matter anymore.
It’s pure light. Like my friend in that film I made, because, unfortunately, that talent young actress friend of mine died in a car crash a year later from this project. Now she is only made of beautiful light in my footage… After that, I realized I needed to capture those moments of life even if I only had a Candle to light. At the time, I enjoyed having not so expensive cameras like a Canon 5D and playing with the environment (shadows and lights) to construct an ambiguous narrative only with images.
Meanwhile, I was finishing my master in Cinema, and I was very inspired by Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Kubrick. But most of my company work so far is for small business. It’s very expensive filming in Brazil and If you don’t have some government help it’s impossible to work as a producer/director. So, I started writing more than directing.
In 2017, I had the opportunity to work as a writer in a big project for TV with an American screenwriter in Brazil. It was the best experience I had so far because it´s a big production and they told us it was an impressive writing job. I had a lot of great reviews. However, In Brazil, things move very slowly. This project is still in pre-production.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
I think, maybe, the best quality for a ‘small Brazilian town girl’ speaking with you right now is that I had this vision on my mind since I was a child that I don’t need to settle for less. Actually, nobody should do it.
I always thought I’m capable of doing everything. I dreamed about being an international actress in my room with no reasonable possibilities of achieving it, but I made my blueprint there. As Tony Robbins said, when your life doesn’t match your blueprint of how you expect it to be, you’re upset. So I became very upset in life, and I had also depression twice.
But as Robbins said, we have two options for happiness and success: change our life blueprint or pursue a life that resonates our blueprint. I know all the problems I will have to face (language, immigration, cultural prejudice, etc.) in order of getting an international career, especially in Los Angeles. But I decided I don´t want to change my blueprint even failing over and over again.
This year, I read Jenna Fischer´s book ” The Actors Life,” and I was crying so much with her story while I was thinking about my journey either and she tells the best advice she got for being a professional actor was: never give up even if It takes a lot of years.
So, I’ll never going to give up even if sometimes I can agree with Seth Godin’s quitting philosophy. When you really love something you can´t give up because life has no meaning without spreading the love you have.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.bougiemedia.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/priscillaavila/
- Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4415164/
Image Credit:
Alexandre Free, Stephen Spencer, Eugene Shin
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