Today we’d like to introduce you to Cristina Nava
Hi Cristina, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My first memory of wanting to be a writer is at the age of seven, although back then, I was an avid reader, so I wanted to write books when I grew up. But I also really loved American sitcoms like the “Cosby Show,” “Family Ties,” and reruns of “Threes Company”…I actually assimilated by watching these shows.
My dreams of being a writer were thwarted because of my immigrant father, who wanted me to play it safe and become a doctor or a lawyer.
I was introduced to filmmaking by way of acting. I took an acting class the last semester of my senior year in high school, and after I performed in a scene from “Gaslight,” my drama teacher was blown away and asked me why I hadn’t been in her class. I couldn’t let her know that it was because my father wouldn’t let me because I may have to kiss boys on stage, lol.
I got the acting bug bad, and the more I landed roles in theater the more stories started to brew inside of me, so I began to write plays. I wasn’t the best writer back then, but I just started writing.
My father’s influence was strong when I was a teenager, so I abandoned acting and writing dozens of times, knowing he wouldn’t approve. I was accepted to UCLA, and I chose English as a major telling my father that as an English major, I could get into law school. When I finally graduated from UCLA, I could no longer hide my lack of desire for being a lawyer, and when I told my father that I wasn’t going to be a lawyer that I was moving out of his house, he refused to speak to me for three years.
While my father rejected me, I ran to the arms of my Latino community of artists and found my way to filmmaking, and I took a job as a substitute teacher for LAUSD to pay the bills. Within the Latino Artist Community, I met people who were braver than me and threw themselves at the mercy of their passion. Then, one day, I met Patrick Perez, an inspiring filmmaker working for network television at the time. We began a romantic relationship, but we also supported each other as filmmakers. We made a great team. We started a film company, got married, had three children, and then in 2011 we took money that we had saved to remodel our ugly blue bathroom- and I mean everything was blue… the toilet, the tub, the sink! We took that money and shot our first feature film called “Lola’s Love Shack.”
An investor who had wanted to make a movie heard about the work Patrick and I did with very little money, and he approached us and hired us, me as a writer and Patrick as a Director. We took the lessons from making “Lola’s Love Shack” and incorporated them into what became our second movie, “In Other Words,” one of them being to make sure that you have name actors, so you’ll find Edy Ganem, who costarred in the Eva Longoria show “Devious Maids” as well as SNL comedy actor “Chris Kattan” appear in it. We were thrilled when HBOMax picked up our little rom-com (available on Tubi and other streaming platforms).
The same investor loved the work Patrick and I did, and we made our next movie titled “Divorce Bait”. We actually shot this one during the worldwide pandemic, and we were one of the first productions to go back into production in Los Angeles.
After producing and writing “Divorce Bait,” a new passion started to brew… I started to feel the need to take my writing to the next level and control what is on the screen, so I teamed up with a college friend, Forrest Hartl, directed a script he wrote, a kids noir film titled “Free Lunch”, which has won multiple awards at festivals.
Today, I proudly say that I am a filmmaker- I straddle both worlds as a creative and a producer, and my latest venture as a producer is with Nancy Los Santos, who wrote a romantic comedy called “Say a Little Prayer” starring Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter, Luis Fonsi and directed by Patrick Perez Vidauri. Teaming with Nancy is another story for another day.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It most certainly has not been a smooth road to get to this point in my life. No one in my family was ever a successful writer in any medium, nor did we have any connection to the film and television world.
After I graduated UCLA, I needed to make ends meet until I found a way to realize these stifled dreams. I began as a substitute teacher and then took a full-time teaching position as an 8th-grade English Teacher, and I wrote and acted on my teacher breaks. I made friends within the artist community in Los Angeles and tried to figure out where the front door was to make it into Hollywood, whatever that meant. To this day, I have yet to find that door. Instead, I would say that I had to go through the speakeasy version of the back door of Hollywood and follow the path of an Indie filmmaker.
When the industry shifted from film to digital, I think this is where we started to see a change. I remember the year that we shot our first feature film with our ugly bathroom money; our other friends who were filmmakers made their movies as well. I believe 9 of us shot movies in 2011. We all had the beg, borrow, steal approach to filmmaking, and I truly believe it was digital movie cameras that made this possible.
The struggle is real when you don’t have nepotism or the support from your family to follow your dreams. Today it is still a struggle to sustain this dream. I still don’t have an agent. I started late in the game as a filmmaker, and I still have to hustle for the jobs that I currently have.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
When I was a kid, people used to call me bossy. Apparently, I ran around the playground and told people what to do. Today, I know that that little girl was actually a LEADER.
What sets me apart from some filmmakers is that I am both creative, but I am also business savvy. I couldn’t wait around for somebody to give me an opportunity, especially when I really didn’t have the resources to do it, so I took every experience and learned the lessons as well as the mistakes, and I took that knowledge from one project to the next. And I have made tons of mistakes.
But at this point in time, in the Indy world, I know how to help another person realize their dream, knowing that I’m strengthening my skills to prepare myself for the next project when I get to focus on mine.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
Perseverance. I simply cannot give up on this dream of becoming a successful writer where I am making a living doing this 100% of the time.
When I think back on all those years of teaching, perseverance is what kept me writing after the school bell had rung, and it was just me and my writing in the classroom until the janitor kicked me out.
Perseverance is what made me tick when I watched other people be given an opportunity while I had no clue how to get where they were.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.migrantfilmworks.com
- Instagram: @iamCristinaNava
- Facebook: @CristinaNava
Image Credits
Vanessa Rodriguez
Cristina Nava
Patrick Perez
