Q&A WITH MONA FASTVOLD

Q. What was it about the Shakers that inspired you to make a film about them and was it always your intention to make it as a musical?

A. I was fascinated by Ann Lee’s story and was excited to have found the story of this real woman who had such a large reach but was completely forgotten, almost about to be erased from history. Most Americans have a relationship to the design aspects of Shakerism — the furniture, the boxes, the beautiful houses — but very few know anything about Mother Ann Lee. Even the folks who live next door to many of the old settlements. 

She led from a place of no ego at all. It was not about her. It was about the community she was creating. I felt that she deserved a place in history. I wanted to lift her up, look at her, and talk about these ideas she had about the equality of race and gender. It was a truly epic and cinematic story. I was drawn to that. 

There was no way to not make it a musical since they worshipped through ecstatic song and dance. The story naturally lent itself to that genre. But, at the same time, I knew that it couldn’t be a traditional musical. It couldn’t be jazz hands. That would have been very, very wrong for the story. 

Q. It’s rare to see such a lived-in period piece as The Testament of Ann Lee made nowadays. How did you accomplish this and what hurdles did you face in realizing your vision?

A. We had a very limited budget for what we were trying to achieve. The budget was similar to that of The Brutalist. Around $10 million for an epic story that spans a lifetime. 

There were so many challenges when it came to raising money and then trying to execute on that budget. The good thing is that all of my creative partners were dedicated and excited to tell this story with me. Everyone gave me so much of their free time. We would spend every weekend and evening while we were doing other jobs in the year-and-a-half leading up to the shoot working on the film — prepping it, doing additional research, planning sets, doing designs for those sets. I was doing very in-depth work with my production designer Sam Bader and my cinematographer Will Rexer. But, everyone was part of the process. Like Amanda, who was part of the process very early on. 

The “lived-in” nature was precisely a result of the fact that it was lived in. We spent so much time in this world. When you do that, you also feel the freedom to break more rules. For example, in terms of saying something like, “I’m going to bring something to set that’s 30 years older than the year the scene is taking place in.” That sort of play, especially when you’re working with a working-class environment where people are wearing hand-me-down clothes and have older objects that are passed down through generations, creates a layered history for the world of the film.

Q. There’s a great deal of faith you must hold when filming moments of revelation or divine intervention so as to avoid representing them in a disingenuous light. Such moments in The Testament of Ann Lee are given a lot of weight. How did you approach them in a way that seemed neither belittling or aggrandizing?

A. Because I was not raised religious, my way into it was thinking about it as a metaphor for my own relationship and dedication to the work I do — the obsessive nature of desperately wanting to try and create an impossible project. 

And, I never wanted to ridicule Ann. If she had been a more well-known, famous religious figure, then dismantling her would be more interesting. But seeing as she is completely forgotten and had been debunked throughout her entire life, I thought I didn’t have to do that again. I could just tell her story in a way that is quite open and allow the audience to make up their own mind about her journey. 

At the same time, there are moments of levity. There’s something quite absurd and hilarious about certain aspects of her story. I felt like I had to include that, but try to treat it with enough warmth and tenderness to not make it feel like I was making fun of her. 

Q. What’s the last film you saw and loved?

A. The 1956 version of Moby Dick. And Pillion — what a great first film.

Q.  What was the first image you had in mind for The Testament of Ann Lee?

A.  The circular dance formations towards the end and the beginning of the film. Hundreds of dancers in these sort of snail-shaped circular images. That’s what was haunting me at night.

Q.  What’s a piece of advice that you’ve never forgotten?

A.  There’s this moment in that David Lynch documentary [from behind the scenes of Twin Peaks: The Return] where he gets really upset because he didn’t have enough time to get dreamy. That’s something Brady and I often say to ourselves. We just need more time to get dreamy. When I saw that, I remember thinking, “I don’t have any time to get dreamy.” Now, later in my career, I’m trying to carve out more time to get dreamy. 

Q. Is there anyone in particular whom you’d love to work with?

A.  Jesse Plemmons was supposed to be in The World to Come, but then we pushed the shoot and he couldn’t do it anymore. I’d love to find something to do with him again. 

Q. What image would you like to end this interview with?

A.  The one movie that I think I looked to a lot with The Testament of Ann Lee was Andrei Rublev, because it’s also a biopic about someone who not much is known about and because it’s also very ambitious. There are several images in it that I would return to again and again in my dreams of making my film. One of them is that shot from the air balloon looking down. I kept revisiting that image in my mind. I don’t know why, but there it was.