New episodes of The Doctors of the Church
The EWTN series The Doctors of the Church honours the 36 Doctors of the Church and their remarkable lives, holiness and writings.The next set of episodes we had to produce dramatizations for were Francis de Sales, Peter Canisius and Robert Bellarmine.
It rarely happens that the lead actor for an episode would spend such extensive amount of time on preparation for the role as Francis de Sales actor did. He learned horse-riding for a month, he grew his beard out, he did research on the character.
There were quite a few complex scenes to shoot. Francis fell of a horse three times and to shoot the fall, the actor had to land on a crash pad made of matresses multiple times. It took a lot of effort to made the horse appear startled as well. We needed archers for the scene of bandit attack in the forest. We shot the scene where Francis is chased by wolves in Gorenjska region in winter time so it was freezing cold. We got three czechoslovakian wolfdogs, we bought a few kilos of animal bones from the local butcher and we were ready to shoot. The dogs were obedient enough to start running towards their owner standing between them and our actor and we got the desired effect of the chase! In the end, the actor immersed himself in the character so much that he said he felt death when we shot the deathbed scene. We were just happy he wasn’t mad at us for making him cross the river barefoot in the middle of winter.
For the Peter Canisius episode, we made another version of the attack scene – he was surprised by a drunk homeless man while travelling.For the Robert Bellarmine episode we had to recreate a papal conclave – that means a dozen of actors in a dozen of cardinal costumes. But still, the most challenging scene to shoot was the meeting between Robert an Galileo that we shot in a tower with very little space.