““I was anxious about the genre,” director Mona Fastvold admitted of her new film The Testament of Ann Lee, which she took some convincing to classify as a true musical. Amanda Seyfried stars in the project as Ann Lee, the founding leader of the Shaker Movement, who is believed to be the female Christ by”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
Amanda Seyfried stars in the project as Ann Lee, the founding leader of the Shaker Movement, who is believed to be the female Christ by her followers. At the LA premiere on Sunday, Fastvold declared Lee as “perhaps the first American feminist” and thought “what a shame” it was that so few people know about her today.
Writing alongside her husband Brady Corbet, Fastvold told The Hollywood Reporter that “because the Shakers worshiped through ecstatic song and dance, it had to be a musical and movement piece, which is what I called it for a very long time. And then Brady ultimately just said, ‘Mona, it’s a musical, that’s what this is when there are that amount of music and songs in the film.'”
It’s certainly not a typical one, though, as she pointed to there being “no separation between the sound design and the music.”
“There’s a deep collaboration that happened between our composer and our choreographer, down to like what are the sounds we’re making when we’re moving and how do we bring those sounds into the soundscape? And the same with our sound designer — how can we bring in the thunder, rain, the wind, the stomps into our score and how can the score be part of our sound design as well?” Fastvold continued. “In that way, sonically especially, I think it’s quite different from a traditional musical.”
Co-star Lewis Pullman added to that point, “It’s like they’re not sitting down for breakfast and singing about how hot the coffee is or whatever. It’s all integrated within their world and it’s just that [Mona] has the patience to let the audience watch from the beginning to the end of the full song.”
Andrew Morrison, Lewis Pullman, Stacy Martin, Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold, Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Tim Blake Nelson and Natalie Shinnick at the premiere. Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Searchlight Pictures
Despite not being a traditional musical, the director did choose to cast an actress with extensive musical experience, with Seyfried having starred in Mamma Mia! and Les Miserables.
Fastvold explained that she was always looking for a strong singer to play Lee, but in the process Seyfried had to explore “a completely different way of singing.”
“The Shakers were not singing or dancing as performance, it was always a form of prayer or emotional expression, so it had to come from inwards and she had to stop listening to herself. We would lay on the floor of the studio and cry and give birth and laugh and scream and try all kinds of different ways of finding a completely different voice for this character,” Fastvold recalled. “She has all of this amazing training that’s there, so she can access that and sing pitch perfect, but she almost had to unlearn all of that a little bit.”
Seyfried admitted when Fastvold first came to her about the role, “I just told her that I understood her passion and I want to make her dreams come true, but I didn’t know if I was right for it” as she “couldn’t picture the movement and I couldn’t hear the songs in my head.”
“But I was strapped in with her because I just trusted her and she trusted that I could be her Ann Lee and I had to just throw my whole body into it. And I did, and I would for her, I would do anything for her,” Seyfried continued. “It’s rare to meet somebody with such a clear vision and a nurturing hand and such a greater knowledge of humanity and seeing the absurdities what exist within humanity in a way that actually is not judgmental. She’s a work of art and she creates works of art.”
The Testament of Ann Lee hits theaters on Dec. 25.