To Build the World of ‘The Testament of Ann Lee,’ Production Designer Sam Bader Had to Craft Three Distinct Locales

Mona Fastvold's film is set in Manchester, New York City, and the wilds of upstate New York. Bader tells IndieWire how he approached such different spaces for the cast to feel at home in.

When Shaker leader and luminary Ann Lee first dreamed of a utopia in which she and her followers could live in harmony and equality, she couldn’t have imagined how far they would have to travel to find such a place. In Mona Fastvold’s “The Testament of Ann Lee,” we follow Ann (Amanda Seyfried) on her journey to a literal paradise in upstate New York, one that takes her from a grimy pre-industrial England to a burgeoning New York City along the way.

But while he was tasked with crafting three distinct spaces, production designer Sam Bader made sure to keep the one place the entire film builds toward — the original Shaker settlement in Watervliet, NY — in mind, even when it came to Manchester and New York City.

“The design of this film is a reflection of the kind of serenity and the kind of harmony with nature she’s trying to create in the latter parts of the film,” Bader said during a recent craft roundtable with some of his fellow production designers, held at IndieWire’s Los Angeles office and moderated by our own Jim Hemphill.

Bader explained his approach to Manchester and New York City as offering different sorts of contrasts to what Ann and her followers eventually build in Watervliet. “Manchester and New York are really about the different kinds of relationships with spaces,” he said. “We knew when we were designing Manchester that we wanted it to be muddled and darker and murkier and people living on top of one another and this kind of dense messiness of pre-industrial England. By the time you get to New York, it wants to be cleaner lines, more dusty and powdery, like a [Vilhelm] Hammershoi painting. Everything wants to feel kind of new and clean-cut.”

When Ann and her followers — only a handful at the inception of the settlement, eventually growing into into the hundreds — decamp for Watervliet, everything changes. Ann and her followers built a sprawling, productive society from virtually nothing, and Fastvold’s film revels in the processes that made it all possible. Bader’s production design speaks to the heart of that.

“By the time the movie takes you up into the woods, and you watch this settlement be built from scratch, and you watch how people literally like chop down trees and square off posts, and put rabbit glue into the window panes, you want that to feel like a reflection of the vision that she had and the kind of journey that she took her followers on to find a type of paradise that is made by them,” Bader said.

No matter the space or location he’s designing, Bader approaches all of his projects with one central aim. “I view the job as making these actors feel like they’re in a home that feels very familiar to them and that is immediately kind of digestible, understandable, and to respond to the emotionality of the scene and the part of the film you’re in,” Bader said.

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