We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Samuel Silva Sanches. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Samuel below.

Samuel, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I figured out my gift when I was around 5 years old. It’s a funny story because one of my teachers asked me to draw a woman, and I remember in this painting the woman was laying down posing holding a vase on her head, and I drew exactly the same, and the teacher was so surprised she brought me to the principal of the primary school. I was afraid if I did something wrong, but they celebrated with me this draw I did, and because of that, I started to develop my gift, starting as a storyboard and artist drawing comic animations. Therefore, I figured out I never liked to copy others animations to draw, so I always wanted something new, and I started to create my own animations and characters with names, powers, stories, villains, and heroes. I was obsessed with writing stories; my father always told me if I had something in mind, I needed to write it down. So, at eighteen years old, I figured out I wanted to be a director, direct my own stories, help people with their lives with their traumas, and make the difference to make someone better.

Samuel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

For those who don’t know me, my name is Samuel Silva Sanches. I’m from Brazil, from a small city called Sao Caetano do Sul, in Sao Paulo, and that was where I lived my 18 years of life after my goal to become a director started. It was a very hard process to get into that college because I needed to prove a lot of documents, money, and an English test, and I wanted to fight to be the best in the score for the test, but I failed three times, just in the fourth one I got, and I was just able to do one year of college with my score, but I’ve passed, and I’ve dreamed of that since I was a kid. I wanted to study in the United States, live there, and create stories to make people feel better about what I learned about life and what I needed to resolve our problems, and my parents always supported this dream to live in the US and study filmmaking. I studied at a college called New York Film Academy in Los Angeles, and it was a big challenge for me because I came to LA alone, without family and friends, only God and me. I had a lot of difficulties with the language as well, even if I did a lot of English schooling. But when you don’t practice, it’s always hard, but I overcame this fear to talk, write, and speak in English; I didn’t give up. While I was in college, I did my first 10-minute film, and I wanted this story to be challenging and very dark about two friends who betrayed each other, and one was killed by the other. That was an amazing experience because I could understand more about how to get into the mind of the actor and learn with them to make the story more interesting. Communication with my crew is important too, and I’m responsible for guiding them because I’m not only the director but also the producer who paid for everything. That part of organizing all the budget was terrible and gave me a lot of hard time, but I keep doing it and always ask for help from people who understand better than me.
So that this project was a successful job for me, probably in few years I gonna look at me and see how i was before, and how I am better now, and with this seek to become one the best Directors of the world will become true, and while this journey I could met new people, friends who teach me new things about film, equipments, money, investment, lighting, and they gave me new opportunities to work in different positions than stay only thinking about directing, I started as a Grip, and second Assistant Camera, and after i developed more knowledge how to be a leader, and how to guide them in a correct way, and faster, I still need to learn more, but i could be in more leader positions as Key grip, and gaffer.
Therefore, my goal now is to keep doing more projects and feature films, and whatever comes to me, I will do it, whatever it takes to get in this dream to be come the best one of the best director of the world.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is to create a story and be able to destroy it to do something new and better, and if you need to cut half of your story, you are able to do it because I believe creativity doesn’t become something you handle and you just use when necessary, but actually you can use it for everything, including your life, to understand your problems and resolve them. I have a phrase that says, “Problems are new, better solutions for our lives”.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Had one time I was directing my third film, and was three days of shooting, and the process was very hard for me because the pre production was exactly crazy because i needed to drive by myself for the first time a van, and I didn’t have someone to help me with, only my producer could be with me in the phone to guine me where i needed to go because while i was dropping all the equipments i figure out i didn’t have internet to open the apple maps, so i was in a call with my producer saying all the name of the street to find the second location to drop half of the equipments, I was very afraid, but in the same time very exited to do it, and fight for it, was very heavy for to drop equipments in two different location, I almost hit the car four times hahaha, but everything went very well.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://pro.imdb.com/name/nm12541420?s=20c5fcaf-3ecc-ad05-dbe8-9578dfe19f41&site_preference=normal
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samssanchess/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-sanches-a83609182/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SamSanchesFilmmaker/videos

Image Credits
Samuel Sanches