We were lucky to catch up with Camila Rizzo recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Camila thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
In 2018, at the beginning of my last quarter in the Directing Program Certificate at UCLA, I had a script that I wrote and developed for my thesis during Writing Classes in earlier quarters. However, I was not completely happy with it.
So, I decided to ask my thesis instructor if I could write another script for the thesis. He said, ” It is a crazy idea since you have to write and develop a whole new script, pre-produce it, and shoot it within three months. But you should go with your gut and go for it.”
One year before, I had an idea for a feature film that I wanted to combine a story of a boy with autism, which I acknowledged while I was a screenwriter in a morning show on TV in Brazil, and the story of the challenge my brother had to face at the end of his career. It could be a good opportunity to make a short film as a proof of concept for the feature film since a big production company in Brazil was already interested in making this feature film.
Bruna Cabral, Ligia Osorio, and Gabriela Bhering were the first to join me on this journey. Bruna and Ligia started producing it while Gabriela and I started to write the script. And so, “Headway” started taking shape. In three months, we wrote eleven versions of the script; I studied autism in-depth, started a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the film, location scouts, auditions, and rehearsals, hired the whole crew, and started shooting at the end of March 2018. This is a very brief summary of everything we went through and built in those intense three months.
“Headway” is about an eleven-year-old boy who deals with the singularities of autism and a late thirties MMA fighter who faces the delicate moment of retirement. Both stories converge in a deep and exciting encounter that triggers within each the solutions to overcome their issues. The film is based on true characters: my brother, Pedro Rizzo, former UFC fighter and two-time world champion, and Igor Nogueira, a Jiu-Jitsu athlete who has autism and also became a world champion later.
In July of 2018, “Headway” had its world premiere at the LA Shorts International Film Festival (LA Shorts Fest) in Los Angeles, California, USA in 2018, an Oscar-qualifying festival that is considered one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. In addition, Headway was selected for other 16 film festivals around the world and won a total of 12 awards.
Headway is now available on YouTube and has been watched by over 450,000 people in more than 50 countries and 49 languages.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Camila Rizzo is an award-winning director and editor. She has over 15 awards, and her projects have been selected for over 30 film festivals around the world, including Academy Awards (Oscars) qualifying film festivals. Rizzo has more than 10 years of background in television. Among the most recent projects, Rizzo directed advertising campaigns for great companies such as Shell and Claro and edited international projects such as Disney TV shows and a Coca-Cola commercial with the American actress Olivia Wilde. It was screened in the US at Regal movie theaters, and it was watched by millions of people.
Previously, Rizzo worked in Rede Globo, the second major network in the world, where she worked on 16 projects: TV series, soap operas, and talk shows, where she had the opportunity to work in the coverage of the Olympic Games (2016), of the World Cup (2014), and in TV shows that were nominee and won the International Emmy Awards.
She graduated from the Directing Program at the University Of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Extension in Los Angeles, California, and also has a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
To produce Headway, we ran a crowdfunding campaign where we managed to raise half of the film’s production cost. We got some support from Starbucks, Chipotle, and Caique Jiu-jitsu Academy, which provided us with gis and one of the locations.
Since we were shooting the feature film in the future, we were able to make partnerships with some professionals and a large post-production sound company called Input Post, which has done the sound post-production for films nominated for Oscars and Emmys.
To finish paying for Headway, I sold my car and got loans from banks in Brazil and the US. Today, everything has been paid off.
How’d you meet your business partner?
At Headway, we have top professionals such as actress Kelly V Dolan, known for her lead roles on Emmy-Nominated Series. The actors Hayden Currie and Connor Chess won awards as best actors for their roles in Headway throughout the festival run. Among the musical composers, we have Alexandre Guerra, who has composed for works of major networks and a documentary nominated for the International Emmy Awards. Another composer was Pietro Milanesi, who has worked with Celine Dion, Moby, and on the soundtracks of the documentary Icarus, which won the Academy Awards (Oscars) in 2018. The editor, Juliana Neves, has already worked on TV shows nominated for the International Emmy Awards. Flavia Vieira has been the make-up artist on major productions by HBO and Netflix, among others.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @milarizzo
- Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/camilahrizzo
- Twitter: @CamilahRizzo
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@milarizzo
- Other: https://imdb.me/camilahrizzo
