The maker of The Testament of Ann Lee on creating a radical biography that’s forged in ecstatic song.
Mona Fastvold was brought up with secular values, so it might seem a bit surprising to compare the writer/director’s tenacity to that of the enigmatic 18th-century spiritual leader Ann Lee. Yet, stumbling across the story of the Mancunian “mother” of the Shakers, the Norway-born, New York-based filmmaker found a subject whose leadership qualities resonated with the ways in which she herself shapes the atmosphere on her film sets: with compassion, kindness and a collaborative spirit.
Alongside her writing (and life) partner, Brady Corbet, Fastvold co-wrote one of 2024’s defining films, The Brutalist. As the pair continue to delve into the specific environments that shape belief, identity and craft traditions – and with composer Daniel Blumberg in tow once more – The Testament of Ann Lee emerges as a technical and musical marvel; an intricate nesting doll of genres that, quite literally, shakes and trembles with emotion, fragility and vigour.
LWLies: I’m curious about your first encounter with Ann Lee. What was it about the story of the Shakers that felt inherently cinematic to you?
Fastvold: The Shakers worship through ecstatic song and dance, and I was really excited to get to dig into movement again. I was reading about their early worship meetings, hundreds of people in a small townhouse in Manchester dancing and shaking and moving… I had such strong images coming to me. The story just begged it to be a very musical, movement-based piece, and that was truly cinematic. Then, of course, there’s the Shaker architecture and design, which became the cornerstone of American design. So much draws a line back to that. There’s nothing more gorgeous than these incredible buildings that they built and objects that they created. So it was so exciting to move from that wild, chaotic, intoxicating beginning to this beautifully simple, synchronised, balanced aesthetic end of it all.
Spatiality is a big player, and in some ways even parallel to what you explored in The Brutalist. Can you say more about how the Shaker material culture influenced the film’s visual grammar?
It’s funny because we didn’t feel like these two projects were particularly linked when we were writing them, but then when we started making Ann Lee, we were like, I guess we have this obsession with chairs? [Laughs.] Of course there are a lot of conversations about faith in The Brutalist as well, so they are speaking to each other, and they are both about American design as well. Shakerism has shaped design all the way to Ikea, which is inspired by Shaker furniture in its simplicity. But that’s like a fast fashion kind of version of furniture, right? And that’s the opposite of Shakerism. They were trying to create things that were functional, simple, beautiful and would last for ever, and trying to perfect that. For them, creating an object or a building was another form of worship, another form of prayer. I have this quote in the film where Ann Lee says, ‘Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live, and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow,’ and it’s about this really profound thing of anything you do, you just put all your love and care into it. It’s an offering.
I’m sure that’s something you can relate to as a filmmaker.
Absolutely. There’s a little bit of madness in wanting to work this hard on something, dedicate 15, 16 hours a day, have everyone be extremely uncomfortable and push further and further to try to perfect this thing so that it will exist. It’s a bit of a madness. What drives you to do that? What kind of faith is that? I was raised in a secular household, I wasn’t raised with a belief system. But there is something about that that I wanted to investigate and understand better.
Did that Shaker spirit seep into the collaborative process?
Every. Single. Day. For all of us, and in everything that we did. My production designer, Sam Bader, and my cinematographer, William Rexer, we all just felt so inspired
by their work ethic. You couldn’t just put an object that’s not beautiful or beautifully crafted in your frame, there had to be thought put into it. That spirit just bled into what we were doing, and everyone really went on that journey.
There’s something about embracing the discipline and process of shooting on film and pursuing a devotional craftsmanship, even if it’s not convenient, that mirrors that spirit too.
We were returning to a lot of analogue techniques. It felt right for the story, but also I’m really excited by it and I think it’s really beautiful. All the drawings in the film are inspired by Shaker drawings and were hand-painted and shot on film. All of the credits were hand-painted and shot on film, but then also the VFX and set extensions were hand-painted on glass and married to the image. Usually, digital matte painters do the set extensions. Here, it’s all done by hand by this beautiful artist, Leigh Took, using an old technique that people don’t really use much any more. Everything is analogue. And Leigh Took’s studio is my dream! He does beautiful model work. He worked with Tim Burton a lot earlier in his career.
I was really excited about bringing back traditional matte paintings on glass because I was watching Age of Innocence and they have these beautiful wide shots of New York that are clearly matte paintings, and even though there’s this artificiality to it, it’s a painterly artificiality. Obviously, I knew I couldn’t build New York or Manchester, but I knew I had to either do it digitally or organically, and I was so excited to do it this way. Then, marrying the picture with my image that I shot on film, and then printing it on film, then scanning it back in… It’s a very lengthy process, but it’s also wonderful because it’s a direct line.
The film is shot on 35mm and projected on 70mm. Considering the ambition of this project, did the physical limitation of film rolls affect the rhythm of your shoots?
Not at all. I wanted to shoot on 35mm and not on a larger format because I wanted to work with lighter cameras for all of the movement work. Sometimes I find it incredibly beautiful that a camera is heavy and has a weight to it, but for this, lightness was so important. The celluloid wasn’t a limitation. I’ve never been a person who rolls and rolls endlessly. And, you know, digital costs money too, and you spend a lot of time in the grade afterwards because you come back with a raw image. I feel it changing now actually. A lot of people are gravitating towards film. I don’t think one is better than the other, they’re just different. For me and Brady [Corbet], the reason we’re so on the soapbox about celluloid is to protect it. We don’t want to lose that tool from the toolbox. We need to make sure that all the tools are available. I’m really interested in modern technology, and I’m really interested in old technology, and whatever is the best tool to tell the story, and to paint the picture, that’s what I’ll use.
It’s interesting to think about the film’s shape. It’s not quite a biopic, not quite a musical. Did you always envision it as such? What are your thoughts on genre and that type of compartmentalisation?
I always tend to write in a way that defies the genre that I’m in. If you’re too comfortable in the story, if you see the first five minutes of a movie and have a good sense of what the last five minutes are going to be like, that’s not so exciting to me, even if it’s really beautifully done. Filmmaking is a new medium compared to, say, literature. If you pick up even an airport novel or something, it can often be more radical in its narrative structure than almost 99 per cent of all movies. When I write, I follow more of a dream logic. That’s the space that I like to be inside of, and therefore I intentionally like to take a detour with another character and then return to the narrative, or have a character appear without necessarily introducing them and maybe they will take up more space than you thought that they initially would. It’s exciting to challenge that a bit. That being said, with Ann Lee I wanted to follow a more traditional structure because I knew that the movement and the music were going to be so radical. I knew that it couldn’t be a traditional musical because we weren’t going to straight-up sing dialogue.
What was the process for crafting that porous boundary between natural sound and score? There is such a strong sonic arrangement between the rhythm of breathwork, the physical percussion against wooden floorboards…
Because the Shakers worshipped through song and dance, it was important that it was grounded in reality. They weren’t performing, it was always moments of prayer, or being touched by the divine. I didn’t want to lose the diegetic audio. I wanted to have every single breath of Amanda [Seyfried], the sound of this [hands rubbing together]. That tactile nature was so important to us, for the vocal performances to be so grounded in that reality. We developed a language where everything had a very precise meaning, so when we had 200 people improvising in a room, they could do this [Mona extends her hands to the sky] or they could do one of these [draws her hands close to chest and outwards]. I would often walk around with Celia [Rowlson-Hall, the choreographer] and Daniel [Blumberg, the composer] and just talk to every single extra or dancer about the meaning of each movement. I’m taking your pain, I’m holding it in my body, I’m transforming it, I’m releasing it... And everyone had to vocalise. They couldn’t just pretend. We needed to hear full on breath. Sometimes we would do live
recordings on set and sometimes we would have playback, but when we had playback everyone was still miked, so we could use it as a guiding track. It was about creating something where, ideally, you would feel that intoxicating sense of prayer. The same goes for the camera. The camera had to be one of the believers. It couldn’t just hang back and observe. Although it’s tempting with gorgeous choreography to want to sit back and create a stage, it just had to be within it for their story.
For a sect that’s committed to celibacy, their shakings were so sexual!
It’s very sexual! I mean, what are you going to do with all that pent-up sexual energy? It needs to have some sort of release. All the orgasms need to be in the movement, so that was exciting too – how can you find this sensual release? In my research finding descriptions of them, there was such tenderness between them and so much love. Love is the core of this religion, truly. I didn’t want it to feel cold or puritanical in any way. I wanted to really show that intimacy and closeness.
I’m sure your own background in movement dance influenced the way you directed these bodily manifestations of devotion and surrender as well.
Always. I’m always searching for the perfect choreography between the camera and the performer. I had my cinematographer and operators around for rehearsals and it was just as much about choreographing them as it was the performers. I’m really close to my choreographer, Celia Rowlson-Hall. We’ve known each other for nearly 20 years and we have such a shorthand. Getting to work even more with movement with this film I think informed my work as a director in non-movement scenes as well. It is always on my mind.
What conversations did you have with Amanda about Ann Lee while navigating her portrayal? How did you guide her towards such a committed, intense performance?
She started prepping almost a year before we started shooting, and we were talking so much. Through the movement and the voice work we found a lot of Ann, and also the dialect work we were doing, creating that accent. And I share, share, share so much research. I’m always like, look at this image, look at these paintings, listen to these hymns... We started recording with Daniel very early on as well and trying out different things together. In terms of the emotional journey, we talked a lot about motherhood as a source of power for Ann Lee. She has to take this trauma and transform it into strength and love. She can either choose to let herself go, but instead she chooses – or has a vision, however you choose to perceive it – and decides, ‘I can’t mother these children, so I’m going to mother the entire world. I’m going to lead the entire world as a mother. All human beings are my children.’ And first, Amanda was like, ‘I don’t know, am I a leader? How am I a leader?’ and I do see her as a leader, but I see her more as that kind of leader, leading from compassion, kindness, understanding, creating space for people to be creative. I saw that gentleness, that grace and kindness that she possesses, and I saw how that really would translate so well for Ann Lee. She’s a very beautiful mother as well, and I saw how she could access that to find Ann Lee. And it was so painful to work on the grief section of the film. It’s so tough to go into that, but for both of us, knowing how we were going to transform it and what we were going to transform it into, it made it possible and healing for everyone.
The film is so focused on Ann’s experience, there’s a very intense subjectivity there. You have the euphoric rush of the Shaker rituals, but then the underlying rot of religious dogma. When it came to showing those elements, was it a constraint to ground the film in that profoundly devoted perspective?
That’s a good question. I think her belief is her survival in this case. Her trauma was so immense that that’s the only way through it. I see it as a portrait of that specific time, and I guess I really wanted to take this story, lift it up, elevate it and give it some space and shed light on it. Her ideas are rooted in religion, but they were really about love, equality, generosity of spirit, kindness… These seeds are also part of American history. I guess it gives me some hope to think about how these ideas can be transformative and maybe fit into, philosophically, something that is of interest now, how it can shape and move with the times that we are in
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