How much did you know about Ann Lee and the Shakers going into this? I knew about the Shakers because I grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania. There’s a lot of Amish around us, but there’s also a lot of Shaker museums, and I knew about the Shaker furniture, I knew about about brooms. I don’t know if you know much about Shaker baskets, but they’re pretty cool. I didn’t know about Ann Lee, though. I didn’t know about the backstory of the movement at all, and I didn’t understand it was a religious, utopian society that came over from Manchester. It was a learning curve for me, but fascinating because she was a feminist and a religious leader in the late 18th century, and she believed in equality between gender and race, and that was, like, absurd at the time.
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So amanda, congratulations on a truly incredible performance in ‘the testament of Ann Lee’, it’s quite something - does anything scare you? Yeah, everything. [laughs] But I think that’s also the point.
Exactly. So what was the pitch for this like? What did Mona Fastvold say to you to get you to sign on for this? She just told me she trusted me. And I think after thinking about it for maybe a week, I decided that the best thing I could do for me is to trust myself as well. And I think when somebody that you trust, like Mona, because I’ve worked with her before, if they think that you’re right for something, they might just be right about that. And then you can just go full force ahead. And because it’s like a dream role, this movie is not for the faint of heart. It’s a piece of art, for sure. It doesn’t fit into any box. And I know Mona has the clarity and the vision and the bravery to do something like this.
You’ve said that Mona told you, ‘I will pay you nothing, you’re going to work very hard, and it’s going to be a very uncomfortable experience for you.’? [laughs] Yeah, no, it’s not funny. [laughs] No, she really tells it like it is. And honestly, it’s like the most valuable thing. I love when people are direct and honest about something and about what they believe in. And I don’t need any bells and whistles. And also, she did create a family, much like Ann Lee did. Mona collaborates in a way, and she’s very maternal in the way that she brings people in, and she makes them feel safe - even sometimes if they’re not! And you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to make a movie like this, with less than $10 million. We were on a real ship, which sucked. [laughs] It was necessary, but there’s a lot of uncomfortable things. But I think that when you get through it, there’s a point to it. If there’s a point, you’re like, ‘Oh, I feel better for it now.’ So it’s that challenge that she prepared me for, I was prepared for.
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So where do you even start with a role like this? It’s obviously like nothing you’ve ever played before? It’s all technical at first. I had to wrap my head around doing an accent. And accents, when you don’t know how to do them, are awful. And then when you do get used to them, they’re addictive. My kids were even speaking with a Manchester accent because I would do it so much with them. My son would be like, [in a Manchester accent] ‘This accent is fookin’ hard.’ He’s five, and he’ll grow out of it. [laughs] But it was very technical and very fun because I had all the time in the world to do it, we had like a year to prepare for this. And then slowly I would get into the dancing aspect of things, and then Celia Rowlson-Hall, who is this amazing choreographer, who kind of created this technique based on Shaker drawings and formations that we’d seen in research and put her own spin on it. Everybody has their own thumbprint in this movie. It’s not exactly as it happened, because we don’t know, but it’s very specific to the artists who were behind this movie. So I think that’s really special of her to do. And then I did that for a bunch of days and weeks on end. I’m not a dancer. It feels good once you know it, but it takes me twice as long to learn something, espe- cially when you’re with other dancers. And some scenes, as you saw, I’d be surrounded by dancers, and then they’d disappear. And then the music part is, I’m a singer, but I had to unlearn. I had to learn how to stop listening to my voice and start trusting my ear and just go with whatever feeling was behind the song, which was interesting and new. And I recommend it for any actors who are also singers to see what happens when you start listening to how it sounds and singing as an actor as opposed to as a singer.
Those are all separate, really huge pieces, the singing, the dancing, the accent. How did you shoot it all? Did you shoot it all sequentially? Nothing in order, we shot, actually, no, we shot some of the Manchester stuff first, because then we ended up on another set, so then that was all America, it was all Budapest. If you want to make a movie for half of what it costs everywhere else, go to Budapest. They have really great crews, and it’s beautiful there. You can get a lot done. But yeah, it was hard.
Nothing is in order ever, so you get used to that very quickly. But, I don’t know. It was so fun and so meaningful and so energetically pleasing and taxing. And I would be hard on myself some days, and then other days I’d just completely let go, you know, just run into a scene with abandon and knowing I could do that and that I was safe to do that was great. So it seems like it’s brave, but also I had a support, completely. The whole time I had like a - trapeze artists have what? Nets?
INTERVIEW
AMANDA SEYFRIED
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