Vianney: The Drama | An Interview with Leonardo Defilippis

Vianney: The Drama | An Interview with Leonardo Defilippis | Carl E. Olson | August 3, 2009 | Ignatius Insight

The one-man drama, Vianney, produced by Leonardo Defilippis and Saint Luke Productions will premier at Saint John Vianney Parish in Houston, Texas, on August 4, 2009, the feast day of the Curé of Ars. Carl E. Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight, recently spoke by phone with Defilippis about the new drama and the Year of the Priest.



Ignatius Insight: You obviously started working on this drama long before "The Year of the Priest" was announced. Was that a providential alignment? How did it come about?

Defilippis: I had an interest in Saint John Vianney, the Cure of Ars, for a long time. I got interested in him through another movie script; someone had wanted me to play him in a movie. So what that did is it got me reading about his life in more detail. That was about twelve years ago. Then I kept that it in the back of my mind; I got so busy with filming Thérèse, but I always wanted to do something about him somehow, somewhere.

About two years ago I did a scene at a church after another performance, to experiment and to see what the reaction would be. It was the scene where he first meets the devil, which is a rather dramatic scene. That got people's interest, and I was playing with it, so to speak, from a performance standpoint. Then I starting doing that after each performance to see how many people knew of him and how many didn't know about him. That developed and I kept planting seeds.

As time went on, about a year and a half ago, I realized that his anniversary was coming up. I was thinking of opening the drama earlier in order to build to build up to Vianney's 150^th anniversary. And I knew the Pope would do something because Blessed John XXIII did a huge encyclical [Sacerdotii Nostri Primordia, August 1, 1959] on John Vianney, so I knew Pope Benedict XVI wouldn't ignore him. But then he did something totally unusual in the history of the Church in declaring this year to be the year of the priesthood. This didn't surprise me too much, but I think it took many people by surprise, and I think the reason is that the majority of people in the United States do not know who St. John Vianney is. I would guess that only ten to fifteen percent of all Catholics in the United States have ever heard his name.

Read the entire interview...