Mona Fastvold‘s set on “The Testament of Ann Lee” is much like the world of her subject, the founder of the Shaker religious movement in the 18th century: Immersive, wildly ambitious, utopian even, and full of deeply felt song and dance true to the period. The “World to Come” director and “The Brutalist” co-writer/producer wrangled, along with her husband Brady Corbet, a sprawling production crew in Hungary for a cool $10 million last year to mount a speculative retelling of the life and times of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), a female Christ figure who brought a following from England to colonial America in pursuit of a more just world.
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Others in the religious sect under Ann Lee’s tutelage are played by Lewis Pullman, Thomasin McKenzie, Stacy Martin, Tim Blake Nelson, and Christopher Abbott as her husband, who eventually defects after the constraints of celibacy become too much to bear. All are seen in this uniquely atmospheric, 35mm-shot musical epic — one of the few big-screen epics about female historical figures, as Fastvold pointed out during the Venice presser — singing original Shaker melodies and words and dancing to Shaker-inspired, movement-forward choreography by Celia Rowlson-Hall. The soundtrack includes both three Blumberg-penned original songs as well as a dozen Shaker hymns they adapted from primary sources, with the cast singing, both in camera and in ADR, the anarchic, guttural music that became the Shakers’ spiritual incantation.
It turns out there are only three Shaker believers still known to be in existence today, though as Fastvold explained to IndieWire ahead of the film‘s TIFF premiere, the filmmakers intentionally did not consult them. “Very recently, a third Shaker joined, and no one has joined [since 1978]. It’s quite extraordinary that a third joined, but no, I didn’t want to consult them because my interpretation of this story is probably quite different from theirs. I’ve taken creative liberties. I’ve merged characters. I’ve imagined things. My reason for telling the story is different probably from their reason to be part of this religion. I thought it was more respectful to let them have their relationship and me have mine,” said Fastvold, who wasn’t raised religiously.”
IndieWire spoke to director/co-writer/co-producer Fastvold and composer Blumberg ahead of the film’s Toronto premiere. “The Testament of Ann Lee” is still looking for a U.S. distributor, though buyer interest sparked at Venice, where the Budapest-shot musical premiered in competition.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length.
IndieWire: Daniel, when did you come on board and start introducing songs into what was scripted?
Daniel Blumberg: As soon as “The Brutalist” finished, I went to New York to really start getting into it with Mona. When I read the script, I was quite interested in the early formation of the Shakers, where they were using wordless hymns, like these very extreme singers I’d seen over the years, like Phil Minton and Maggie Nicols, and a very extreme singer called Elvin Brandhi, all of whom are quite seminal improvisers. And Shelley Hirsch as well, who’s in New York. They were the first sounds I heard when I read the script, even before having heard Shaker music.
The fact that they were expressing themselves in this way related to these artists that I really loved. We got them involved with doing workshops with Amanda because it’s a very vocal score and project. They’re quite simple, the melodies. A lot of the recordings made of [Shaker songs] are quite unrelated to how they would have practiced, without instruments originally. There was definitely a license when we were messing with ideas in New York. It started to fit into the way that I have worked with songs and improvised music for the last 15 years. We just tried to push everything. The film is pretty extreme, so as soon as we got to something, we were always thinking, how can we push it further?
Mona, what were your primary sources in researching and identifying Shaker hymns to use in the movie?
Mona Fastvold: There are recordings of older Shakers, who passed away. There are some great books that had a lot of sheet music and the songs written out, where we could listen to some of the wordless hymns. The Massachusetts public library has a lot of interesting sheet music, and the same for Hancock Shaker Village [a living history museum], which gave us a lot of access to sheet music as well. Of course it sounds very different from the movie, even though the melody is the same or the lyrics are the same or slightly change. Daniel will do a strange counter-harmony or a key shift, and all of a sudden, it just would transform something in a really unique way. He listened to something or I would play something, Daniel would sing, and once I heard it especially in his voice, I got terribly excited. At one point I was just like, oh, God, how is it not going to be Daniel singing the entire track of the film? So I was so in love with the early demos, but, yeah, but that was the next step, sort of finding for the actors, finding their way into it, and finding their way of like, singing these singing these tunes as well?
There are moments where you want the singing to be more rough and then by the time you are in colonial America, the vocals and the movements are more crystallized and confident.
Fastvold: That’s the arc for both the movement and the voice work. We have all these improvisational singers and wordless singing in the beginning. Same with the movement, it’s wild and disorganized and ecstatic.
Blumberg: I had to teach the songs to the actors. The perspective of voices onscreen… that was conceptually really interesting but also technically [challenging]. The ADR process was interesting as well, replacing extras’ voices with wild improvisers. Maggie Nicols, one of the singers who is part of the score, came on set and improvised in the first time you see them praying together.
A lot of [the music] was recorded at my Airbnb when people had time off from shooting, they would come and record the vocals. We wanted this heightened feeling where it was less part of the picture and more part of this dream language. It was definitely the least amount of sleep I’ve had for two months.
Fastvold: We always recorded sound. Everyone was always mic’ed. At times, the actors would have an earpiece and sing live. Then, we would go back in and play our demo and sing loud on top of that demo. In the edit, I could always listen to what we had pre-recorded, what we had recorded on set, or listen to this guide track being sung on top of the playback. We weren’t dogmatic about ‘everything is going to be live-sung,’ because there are many environments that don’t work for that, and some of the choreography is extremely challenging. I wanted to always have a guide or version of an in-the-moment performance that could guide the breaths, so we can add in the little mistakes that you make and that makes the performance great.
When did the actors start rehearsing?
Fastvold: Everyone got their songs as soon as they could to listen to them and practice on their own. Everyone was working with either a choreographer or choreographer’s assistant, except for Lewis [Pullman], because his mother is a wonderful dancer and choreographer, so we sent her the choreography. So he was practicing with his mom in advance, but then we had a few workshops with our improvisational singers in advance, one in London and some in New York for Amanda. And then, when we got to Hungary, we had a super intense workshop period prior to [filming].
Blumberg: All the actors had different relationships with singing. The Shakers were not doing auditions. There were a lot of untrained voices. We had over 100 singers during the process of recording the score and the songs. There was an amateur choir who would meet every Monday. Phil Minton has a thing called the Feral Choir, where you have to be an untrained singer, and then you come and perform as an improvised choir. We did three sessions; there was PJ, who works at the pub on my street, and my family. It was a really strange mix of people but Phil was helping them make guttural sounds, similar to the work Shelley was doing in private with Amanda.
One location that had to be a challenge to choreograph movement and singing in is the ship that makes the transatlantic voyage from England to the Americas. It’s a Swedish replica of an 18th-century ship that’s also fully operational.
Fastvold: That whole sequence is a lot of old-school filmmaking, where it looks great but someone’s off-camera throwing a bucket of water in someone’s face. We found this incredible ship that’s a replica of an actual ship that sailed in the late-1700s. They built a replica of it down to hand-stitching the sails. They let us shoot on it, but even a tall ship is really small. So when all of a sudden, you’re doing a choreographed movement piece on a ship like that, we kept having it taped up, saying, “This is the space we have.” Celia got there and was like, “What the fuck?” It’s so difficult to move in that space. There was an actual storm coming in while we were shooting the storm, which was great for the light but extremely dangerous… we had to be done before the lightning started, and we shut down. It was very challenging, but so beautiful because it smelled of tar, and you had all this beautiful detail that you could touch and feel and see. It felt like time travel a little bit.
You did a lot with that $10 million!
Fastvold: Instead of [the ship] moving, you have to create a choreography where every extra, everyone is always moving to the imaginary waves of the ocean, and the camera, too, so the whole crew for several days, everyone was just leaning to the left, leaning to the right. It’s very low-rent and extremely ridiculous while you’re doing it, but once it all comes together, it works quite beautifully.
