The Brutalist arrived around this time last year, enamoring design fans with its considered depiction of architecture and earning 10 Oscar nominations. Now, the same filmmaking power couple behind that awards season juggernaut is blessing us with another deliciously designed period epic; The Testament of Ann Lee hits theaters on Christmas Day. Directed by Mona Fastvold and cowritten by Brady Corbet, director of The Brutalist (which the pair also wrote together), the lushly immersive sort-of-musical stars an electrifying Amanda Seyfried as Ann Lee, founding leader of the burgeoning Shaker religious movement in the mid-18th century.
Lee, pegged by Fastvold as the “first feminist” of colonial America, was born in Manchester, England, in 1736. She would go on to become “Mother Ann,” leader of a radical new religious sect that touted celibacy, racial and gender equality, and pacifism, gathered to worship in lively song and dance, and became famous for their wooden furniture, which focused on unornamented beauty, functionality, and craftsmanship. Designing a convincing biopic set two centuries ago requires some deep digging—but production designer Sam Bader, a voracious researcher, was more than up for it. “The challenge of excavating a reality out of a pre-photographic era for film energized me from the outset,” he tells AD.
Bader began by studying texts about the era and poring over the New York Public Library’s picture collection. “I like to ingest as much imagery and text as possible and to sort of catalog it and be very free associative with what I choose,” he explains. The work of artist William Hogarth became a frequent reference point, his paintings and engravings of 18th-century England informing the earthy color palette and squalid lifestyle of Manchester’s pre-industrial working class—the “messiness of crawling out of medieval time into modernity,” as Bader puts it.
Historic cutaways of English boarding houses and other artworks of the day served as further source material, though Bader also looked to less straightforward places for inspiration. “For example, my initial pitch book had Charlie Bucket’s family’s house [from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory] for the Lee family home, just because I knew that there was something about four people sitting in a shared bed in a very densely decorated space.” And while we don’t literally see two sets of grandparents sleeping toe-to-toe in the final film, that reference can be felt in the cramped, candlelit living quarters that we see on screen.
Like The Brutalist, The Testament of Ann Lee was primarily filmed in Budapest, Hungary, over just 34 days. Studio backlots hosted the streets of Manchester, an early-19th-century fort served double duty as the onscreen infirmary and prison, while a smattering of other locations were found in the area, including a goldmine of a property an hour outside of the city that provided space for the Shaker settlements, the textile mill where Lee works as a child, and several character homes. For the ship that takes Lee and her followers to America, the production filmed on Sweden’s Götheborg, a functioning replica of an 18th-century ship, which they used in concert with a smaller, seaworthy boat, and built sets to represent the spaces below deck. A small amount of footage was also shot on location at the Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts.
The muddiness of Manchester gives way to a brighter color palette later in the film as Lee and her followers travel to America in pursuit of religious freedom. It is there that the Shakers began constructing their own community, furnished with the functional, beautifully crafted wooden furniture that the group is known for. The group regards building something with one’s hands as a prayer in itself, and as such, pours hours into crafting thoughtfully conceived and perfectly executed pieces. Bader consulted “the dearth of Shaker imagery and text” for reference points. From there, much of the Shaker furniture and buildings seen on screen were built from scratch in Budapest for the film. (Along with the buildings, the crew constructed eight chairs, three beds, two cabinets, and one adult cradle.) “I’d scanned 400 pages out of a rare book of all the Shaker furniture,” he explains. “That was a huge time-saving hack to be able to build…. Just to see the drafted reality was huge.”
In his research, Bader found woodcut illustrations of a design gem that ended up featuring heavily in the last part of the film: candle holders that fit onto the peg rails that line many of the interior spaces in the Shaker community. The pegs were also used to hold up chairs, clearing the floor so that the Shakers had room to do their wild singing and dancing—the style of worship that gave them their name, derived from “the Shaking Quakers.”
A prominent example of the Shaker design ethos is featured in the congregation hall that they build in the New World: a big, open-floor plan, with a tree of life mural and peg rails lining the walls. The production built the meticulously designed space in an old barn on a rural property an hour outside of Budapest. It was full of “speedboat husks and old chicken wire,” but it also had the correct proportions, plus “a beautiful early-19th-century vaulted ceiling with joists and beams.” Bader and his crew took the structure down to just the necessary load-bearing walls in order to rebuild it in the correct style. “There’s certain relationships between the doors and windows that are very important to maintain that visual harmony,” says the designer, who spent a lot of time “inching things around” in the set’s blueprints on Photoshop to achieve that godly uniformity. “It had to be unimpeachably Shaker, it had to be proportionally quite perfect—or near perfect.”
