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.
