Prayer & Persistence: 2020 Grad Makes Waves In Film Community
When you feel like you have a God-given mission, you can’t give up on it. You must
persist until it starts to come to fruition.
That’s why ORU alum Kayla Williams became so persistent about pursuing a career in film and television production.
“I love to do my best,” Williams said. “I want to be the best at what I do, and I know I can’t be the best at everything, so I had to pick and choose.”
But her choice wasn’t entirely her own, as she felt a strong calling to work in the film industry in some form or fashion but didn’t yet have a plan on bringing that about. Being local to Tulsa, she started investigating programs within a 30-mile radius of the greater Tulsa area, and that’s when she landed on ORU.
“It reminded me of the verse in Luke where Mary is approaching Elizabeth and Elizabeth says the baby leapt within her,” Williams said. “That’s how my spirit felt. Something just jumped within me.”
She enrolled and began to pray, offering her calling back to the Lord who had given it to her:
“I prayed, ‘God, I have this thing inside me that tells me You’re calling me to film, and if I don’t use that, I feel like I’m wasting what You’ve given me.’”
That prayer, combined with an outrageous work ethic, started to pay dividends as Williams began her ORU career and sought a foothold into a notoriously closed-off industry.
Networking with other students led to one opportunity; a well-timed email led to another. Williams was unafraid to pester producers just to get on a set doing whatever job they might have available. Her persistence landed her positions; her work ethic kept her in the circle until she was able to land multiple jobs while she was still a student.
“Senior year I got on the Matt Damon film Stillwater,” she says of the forthcoming feature starring the Oscar winner and directed by another Oscar winner, Tom McCarthy. Production for the film took place largely in northwest Oklahoma. “I saved all my skips and so that week of school, I just skipped so I could do the film.”
Williams has been so favored and is now in such demand as a second Assistant Director
that she is currently booked for another feature and worked on the pilot episode of
a “cinematic television show” for FX. Her slate is so crowded that, not only is she
earning a living in her field, but she was also able to pay off all her student loans,
freeing her up to step into her career completely debt-free.
Where did this drive come from? Williams credits her parents—her father is a member of ORU’s Class of 1981—for instilling it within her and ORU for providing opportunities to hone it.
“I think a lot of my work ethic was already there,” she said, “but one thing my dad told me when I asked him about ORU: he looked at me and kind of teared up and said, ‘I wasn’t ready for it to end.’ That one statement drove me through my entire college career.”
Williams came to the ORU campus ready to savor every moment of her four years here.
“My college experience was made because I took advantage of so many different opportunities. I did Study Abroad, I did ORU Missions, I did the Prayer Movement. I didn’t do everything at once, but I took advantage. I had this thing about: I want to experience everything this college has to offer, and I tried my hardest to do that!”
Pictured top: Kayla Williams (center) poses with the stand-ins for Abigail Breslin and Matt Damon on the set of Stillwater.
Pictured middle: Kayla Williams performs her duties as Second Assistant Director while on a recent production.