The Shaker sect portrayed in Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee saw labor as a form of worship —and believed that building a chair or a home could be like a prayer.
So the film’s production designer, Sam Bader, tried to emulate their commitment to craft.
Bader set out to physically immerse audiences in the spiritual journey of Mother Ann Lee, the founding leader of the group who is played in the film by Amanda Seyfried. The real Ann Lee led her small band of followers from England to America in 1774, and the Christian group came to be known for ecstatic worship, celibacy, and handcrafted furniture so simple and sturdy that it remains prized today.
Bader relied on still-standing buildings from the Hancock Shaker Village, a historical site in Massachusetts, and new sets built primarily in Budapest, Hungary. He used paintings to imagine the pre-photographic world of the Shakers.
“Researching, you look at artists like John Lewis Krimmel and Francis Guy, and see what homes looked like,” he says.
His designs were guided by the Shaker demand for functionality, and the cramped buildings of the time.
“The base layer was a grasp of the 18th century, people’s lived realities and work realities, and how people moved through space,” Bader explains. “People owned very little and had even less space to store it. The reality was that there weren’t multi-roomed homes, especially for the lower class in England.”
Space in The Testament of Ann Lee
Fastvold wrote the film’s script with her partner, Brady Corbet, with whom she also wrote 2024’s The Brutalist, which he directed. Both The Testament of Ann Lee and The Brutalist are stories of starting a new life in America, and both make strong impressions with their bold production design.
Bader used the sets to chart the Shakers’ precarious path from a gritty life in England to a better one across the Atlantic.
Life in England “was murkier, more muddled,” Bader says. But when the Shakers move in the film to New York, “things open up with fresh builds, blue skies, and blue waters. It creates a spatial story arc, ending in utilitarian spaces that are in harmony with nature.”
Fastvold and cinematographer William Rexer II shot on 35mm film because of its painterly quality. The film used “a little limited CG, and mostly analog matte paintings, which give a handmade quality that melds well with celluloid,” Bader notes.
The film’s meeting-house facade, for example, was a freestanding structure with its roof extended by a CG matte painting.
“Seeing the movie’s first assembly, I lost track of which was which, even though I designed them,” he says.
The painterly approach came naturally to Bader, who eschewed the use of AI.
“I come from an oil painting background. I studied classical drawing and abstract oil painting from a young age, got into college on an art portfolio, and wound up in Los Angeles and USC with the idea of a studio art career,” he explains.
He eventually moved to New York and landed a job as a production assistant for production designer Adam Stockhausen on Steven Spielberg’s 2015 Bridge of Spies.
“There’s an unbroken chain from then to now,” he adds. “The path through the art department to art directing is how you emerge as a production designer for shows at various budgets and scales.”
Sam Bader on Gifts From the Shakers
The most potent symbol in the film emerged from the Shakers’ archives.
“The biggest symbolism that wasn’t on the page, which I found with Mona, was the tree,” Bader says. “The Biblical tree of life, Eden, and the apple orchard are all strong in Shaker art, and we wanted to riff on that.”
The team also drew directly from the Shakers’ “gift drawings” — works of art born from spiritual visions. The Shakers believed they were received from God, and often rendered them on simple cutouts of paper.
Bader and Fastvold took artistic liberty to feature the drawings as murals on the walls of the film’s sets.
“Even though there isn’t a Shaker meeting house with painted murals as such, we wanted to riff on that,” Bader says.
The film’s title cards, meanwhile, are inspired by the “hieroglyphic, primitive, cave-painting-like motifs” found in the Shaker’s messages.
“When the movie ends, woodcuts, artwork, and photography become formalized in the audience’s mind,” says Bader.
The Testament of Ann Lee is now available on video on demand, from Searchlight Pictures.
Main image: Amanda Seyfried leads the ensemble of The Testament of Ann Lee. Searchlight Pictures