In Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, a towering historical musical starring Amanda Seyfried as the titular, cultish founder of the Shaker religious movement, you’ll first discover a lucid recreation of the muck and squalor of the English city of Manchester in the 1750s, from its churches to its jail cells to its wool workshops. Next, you’ll watch an 18th-century merchant ship tossed against towering waves under flashes of lightning, its ensemble cast dancing and singing, rain-drenched, on the deck. Then, you’ll see New York in the 1770s, its gridded streets lined with Georgian civic buildings, and the wide-plank floors and decorative fireplaces of a middle-class home’s parlor. And finally, you’ll witness the birth of the ascetic, minimalist architecture and furniture that remains the Shakers’ most enduring legacy, coming together in a dazzling montage of timber being felled, hand saws carving elegant lines, and dust being swept from the finished products.
The mastermind who brought these various, vividly realized worlds back to life? Sam Bader, who, despite having an extensive CV as a seasoned art director, 3D-concept illustrator, graphic designer, and researcher, has just half a dozen credits as a feature film production designer to his name—none of which match the scale and ambition of Ann Lee. But it was exactly the wide spectrum of disciplines he had under his belt that made Bader the right person to recreate the world of the early Shakers. With the head-spinning array of time periods, settings, and aesthetic styles he’d have to recreate across the film’s multiple chapters, it was a project that would require every ounce of initiative and creative ingenuity Bader possessed.
And that’s without mentioning the need to work within the parameters of an indie budget. As you might expect, the major studios weren’t exactly lining up to finance a musical about an obscure historical religious leader from the 18th century, featuring an original suite of hypnotic, avant-folk songs and outbreaks of rapturous dance. If only they’d had, well, faith: The Testament of Ann Lee is one of the best and most blazingly original films of the year—and its mesmerizing production design is among its crowning achievements.
Here, Bader talks to Vogue about the extensive research process that underpinned his designs, the story behind that jaw-dropping ship sequence, and why the Shaker aesthetic still resonates today.
Vogue: To go back to the beginning, tell me a little more about how this project first ended up in your lap. Did you know Mona already?
Sam Bader: To go way, way back, Mona needed a production designer to do a teaser, much of which ended up in the film later on. It was actually Andrew Morrison [the film’s producer] who brought me in. It was in Massachusetts in the dead of winter in January 2024. And so I jumped in and designed this two-day shoot with them at the Shaker Village there, converting it all back to the 18th century. Frankly, I didn’t know a whole lot about the project at that point, but I found Mona’s energy and style to be infectious, and I wanted to read the script, so I did. And then I did what any good designer does: I built out a bible of references across every set, and had a couple of meetings with her and got hired in May, and then jumped right in. So it was my first time working with Mona, and my first time designing something on this scale. And my first time designing in Europe—or anywhere else, for that matter.
I imagine it was an exciting task, but also a daunting one—just the sheer scale of it, and what you had to achieve on what was a fairly limited budget. Then, there’s the fact the Shakers are probably best remembered today for their furniture and architecture, so that could end up being quite closely scrutinized. Did that make you trepidatious at all?
I was probably too pumped up on adrenaline and excitement to fully bask in the trepidation, but it was there. It’s true: The Shaker aesthetic, the architecture, the furniture, it’s so well-documented. Picking the best pieces, the best moments, the best shapes to represent something that’s so expansive and quite uniform in a lot of ways—that was intimidating. But then adding some kind of visual variance and intrigue, that was intimidating too. Then, there was getting the functionality of the settlement and the spaces right—really understanding how people lived their lives, what they possessed, what those things meant to them, how they displayed them. And a lot of that came out of what was a kind of relatively short, but pretty intense, research process.
What kind of things were you looking at?
I was studying a lot of the Shakers’ own paintings and village views and Gift Drawings. And then just looking at all the en plein air painters who were really starting to emerge and become more commonplace at the time. You had Bruegel and the Dutch thing happening before that, but I was also looking at Joseph Derby, and Paul Sandby, and William Hogarth, and Francis Guy—all those American and British painters who were just showing everyday life. That was a huge contextual roadmap in a lot of ways. But translating that into something that felt authentic rather than something hamfisted or too obvious—finding the subtlety there, while still making it visually legible—that was very daunting.
I read that you were working on it very closely with Mona for quite a while before production started, with a lot of that happening at her home in New York. Can you tell me what that period looked like?
Mona had a really strong idea—in the conceptual sense and in the broad visual sense—of what she wanted these worlds to be: from Manchester, to the passage to North America and the New World, and ultimately the Shaker settlement. She’s very responsive, and very quick to know what’s working and what isn’t. So a lot of that had been worked out really early. Will Rexer, our director of photography, would come over a lot too. We’d have dinner at Mona and Brady s house probably weekly, and even more regularly when we were really in the thick of it before going to Budapest. I was doing a lot of quick hand drawings and Photoshop mockups and some light 3D, just to frame out what we needed to build—what had to be quite rigid and unmoving—and then what was more jazz, what could be a little more improvisational. It was a very tight collaboration, which made scouting a much more fluid and quick process—which it had to be, given the prep time and the amount of scenery we were going to be producing.
I also read that you found this really amazing, versatile location in Hungary, which you were able to use for a whole bunch of different settings. How did you discover it?
I think I’d been scouting for two or three days alongside our fantastic art director, Csaba Lodi, and what we were finding was all bearing out to be very time- and cost-… not prohibitive, but quite straining, with all the traveling it would require. We were in the van, and Csaba had a lightbulb go off, and we pivoted to visit this almost entirely unfilmed farmstead. It’s an early 19th-century, semi-state-owned property about 40 minutes outside of Budapest. We saw the main estate and immediately were like, Okay, this is a great Mancunian merchant-class room—not too stately, not too hovel-esque. And it’s got a pretty good facade as well, and a good dirt road to lead you into it. And then within that same estate, we found a room that was a great base to build out the colonial-era Georgian mullions and panel molds we’d need for New York. And if that weren’t enough, we walked through a thicket into a clearing, and there was this expansive field with an old barn or granary that had three floors. We walked in there and were like, “Oh my God, this is everything we need to make the Lee family home and all the textile workshops.”
At that point, we were like, “This couldn’t possibly get any better,” but we also wanted to see what else was there. A few hundred yards away there was this unassuming concrete drop site for old junk with farming equipment in there, but I took a bit of a leap of faith and was like, “If we could knock out every wall in here that isn’t load-bearing, there’s a darn good vaulted wooden ceiling and we could basically clad out for the meeting house.” That was probably one of the more ambitious aspects of the design, just given the time we had to do it—and, again, given the daunting part of achieving those really perfect Shaker proportions and materials and details. When we saw that location, I think it was a moment when Mona put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I think we’re going to be okay.” [Laughs.]
The meeting house looks so striking on screen. What was the story behind that tree motif that is painted on the back wall?
I’d have to go back and read the script again, honestly, as I can’t remember if that was a baked-in part of the film, and I want to be careful. But I do remember Mona really fell in love with this motif. In the Hancock Shaker Village, there’s a massive, beautiful, 600-year-old tree that stands higher than even the tallest buildings, and I took a photo of it on a medium format film camera, and I loved that photo. It’s probably a stretch to say that’s what inspired it, as trees are so prevalent in Shaker art. But even though we adhered to the Shakers’ reality in the spaces and the architecture, we did allow ourselves a few quite deliberate flourishes, and I think that was the biggest one. It’s so gorgeous; so naive and yet so brilliant. And to not find a way to really put it front and center and to showcase it would feel like a huge loss. Mona and I both agreed on that. Also, Ann Lee’s last scene is in the apple orchard, if I recall. So it really is about that broader Shaker ethic of finding harmony with nature.
You touched on this already, but the film takes place in quite a wide range of different environments: Manchester in the 1750s, the ship, New York a few decades later, and then finally the Shaker settlement. How did you ensure they all felt distinct from one another, especially when many of these different worlds were sort of coexisting in the same location?
It was difficult. I mean, it’d be hubris to say otherwise. I think creatively we all knew Manchester wanted to feel quite warped and rectilinear and muddled, with people living on top of one another and life spilling out onto the streets—this kind of Juraj Herz vision of chickens being plucked and meat hanging in the open air. It was also inspired by William Hogarth and a whole litany of his contemporaries.
For the ship, I remember Mona saying something like, “Then you’re on a ship and it’s just a big horizontal line and it’s blue and it’s open,” and I think that was one of the moments while interviewing for this where I was like, “Oh, we’re speaking a similar language.” Then in New York, all of a sudden you go from these burgundies and olives to this spectrum of browns and chalkier tones—this kind of Hammershøi palette—and everything feels freshly sawn, freshly painted. That felt very cohesive. And I also designed a lot of it knowing that we’re backing into this Shaker palette and aesthetic for the final section.
When I first saw the film, I found the scenes on the ship especially mind-boggling—the fact you were able to achieve this really sumptuous and convincing setpiece on the budget you likely had. It was a replica of an 18th-century ship you found in Stockholm?
We d been running through ship options pretty much from the start, and eventually we settled on the Gothenborg in Sweden. We completely cleared it out alongside the conservator and set up all the netting, all the hammocks, all the trunks. Even though it’s shot in this candlelit, shaky way, it was a fully dressed set—we were not hiding anything—which gave Mona and Will a lot more freedom of movement. Then we had two teams, one from Belgium and one from France, come in to get all the sails up in time, which was the other saving grace—these beautifully recreated sails with hand-stitching and everything. Just so brilliant. And then for the flooding, which happens in the lower decks, we created a wooden structure on a backlot which we re-cladded and installed a lot of scenery into and fully dressed, then built an SFX flooding tank around so that you could get that amount of gushing water and have it just seeping in through every crack. And then the miniature, which was for the one shot of the ship in a wide with the storm, that was done by our matte painter, Lee Took, who also does miniature work, and he recreated the wind and the rain. That was a huge achievement from the whole team.
The sequence where they’re constructing the Shaker settlement was pretty breathtaking as well, especially in tandem with Daniel Blumberg’s incredible score. I think I got chills watching it all come together—I can only imagine how fulfilling it must have been for you to watch that for the first time.
I have to say, the moment I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this film really worked—or that my work was really doing its full job—was when we saw an early assembly with everyone who was in New York at the time. And I’ve got a pretty critical eye, I’d like to think, and of course I made all those sets with the team and knew how everything was done. But during those montage sequences, I genuinely had a couple of instances where I was like, “Wait, when did we do that? Was that in Massachusetts or Hungary?” That was a real goosebumps moment. I also have to shout out another gentleman named Michael Burry, who came in from Plymouth, Massachusetts, when we were shooting at the Hancock Shaker Village. Initially, I was trying to source period woodworking equipment—scribes and felling axes and squaring axes and all these arcane old things that only 100 people know about anymore. I got put on to him, and he has a PhD in period timber framing. He was called in to help with the restoration of Notre Dame when it burned down, just a total unicorn-type person. In fact, you see him in the movie, because he’s felling the tree with Lewis Pullman and squaring off the posts. He was a huge help. But all of it coming together like that was just alchemy. I mean, it really feels like we built a village.
There’s been something of a revival of interest in Shaker furniture within the design world over the past few years. As someone who s spent so much time immersed in researching their work and recreating that aesthetic, what is it about them and their approach to design that makes them feel so relevant today?
There’s no one answer, I think. When I see some of the more iconic shapes in Shaker furniture, I see something that is undeniably unique and singular. And yet I think the other side of the story is that they really took a lot of forms and methods that already existed, and made something new out of it. When you see it, there’s something familiar about it, but also something unusual about it. I think that’s why it endures—or at least that’s the answer that comes to the front of my mind.
After spending so much time in their world, did any aspects of their design philosophy rub off on you at all? Did you get home to New York and start nailing pegs up on the wall?
Well, between work and family, I’ve been either on the road or very busy since then. But I do have pegs sitting in a wooden box, and I do have some of the rails, and so by the time I get back in the spring of next year… we’ll see. But yeah, the utility of it all and their ability to find a place for everything—and have everything in its place—is infectious. It’s rubbed off on me without a doubt.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
