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A few days before Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony, Bryce Dessner admitted with a laugh that he’d come to Los Angeles without a tuxedo — something of a problem, given that he was up for an award.

“The movie people think about what the actors are going to wear, of course, but the composer — who cares?” he said last week over lunch in Beverly Hills. “I was like, ‘Guys, do you have something I could borrow?’”

He might consider getting a tux of his own: Though Dessner and Nick Cave inevitably lost the original song prize at the Globes to the chart-topping “Golden” from “KPop Demon Hunters,” their title theme from director Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams” made the shortlist for an Academy Award nomination, as did Dessner’s score for the movie about a laborer in northern Idaho in the early 20th century.

Adapted from a 2011 novella by Denis Johnson, “Train Dreams” follows Robert Grainier (played by Joel Edgerton) through 80 years of life in all its turmoil and routine; we watch as he cuts down logs in the forest, as he nurtures a romantic relationship and becomes a father, as he returns home one day to a nightmarish discovery from which he never quite recovers. A stirring meditation on work, love, nature and grief, the film doesn’t contain much dialogue — critics have compared it to the movies of Terrence Malick — which means that Dessner’s gently rippling chamber-folk music is an almost equal partner to the images in the storytelling.

“It’s the water of the river that moves the film along,” Bentley said.

The title song features a haunting vocal performance by Cave, the veteran Australian post-punk singer and songwriter, who was so taken with Dessner’s music that at first he was reluctant to take part.

“The last thing someone who’s crafted a beautiful score wants is some rock star to come in and sing all over the top of it,” said Cave, himself an experienced film composer. “It’s happened to me many times.”

Best known as a member of the Grammy-winning indie-rock band the National, Dessner, 49, is one of a growing number of rock musicians finding a place in Hollywood. Last year’s winner of the original score Oscar was “The Brutalist’s” Daniel Blumberg, who got his start in the band Yuck; other composers on this year’s shortlist include Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (for “One Battle After Another”), Nine Inch Nails (“Tron: Ares”) and Daniel Lopatin, who makes records under the name Oneohtrix Point Never (“Marty Supreme”).

And Dessner isn’t the only member of the National to establish a successful career outside the group: His twin brother Aaron is an in-demand pop producer who’s collaborated with Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and Brandi Carlile, among other acts.

Yet “Train Dreams” feels like a breakthrough for Bryce Dessner — the point where his backgrounds in roots music, concert performance and film scoring converge.

He came on to the movie early, having previously worked with Bentley on 2021’s “Jockey” and 2023’s “Sing Sing” (for which Bentley and his creative partner, Greg Kwedar, earned an Oscar nod for adapted screenplay).

“They sent me the script and I composed a fair amount of music” as Bentley was shooting, Dessner said, “which tends to be a bad idea.” He recalled a similar experience about a decade ago on Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “The Revenant.” “I wrote like two hours of cello music and then Alejandro — he’s the nicest person — he was like, ‘So, I have to tell you — I don’t think we need cello.’”

Dessner, who lives in Paris with his wife and young son, was dressed in his usual all-black, as indeed he would be the next night during a live-to-screen performance of “Train Dreams” at the Egyptian Theatre.

“But in this case it worked, I think because it’s a different kind of film — more like a cinematic poem,” he said of “Train Dreams.”

Some of Dessner’s cues evoke the chugging rhythms of a locomotive; others, he said, were inspired by the raw splendor of the Pacific Northwest — a landscape he immersed himself in by recording much of the score at Flora Recording in Portland, Ore., where the National had worked before.

“It’s got analog gear and old ribbon microphones and a janky upright piano,” he said of the studio. “I wanted some dust on the sound.”

Nick Cave at the Royal Festival Hall in London in October.

(Jonathan Brady / PA Images via Getty Images)

For the movie’s title song, Bentley said Cave was the only person he could imagine striking the right tone: a delicate blend of weariness and gratitude.

“I actually don’t know if I could’ve moved on if he’d turned us down,” the director said.

In a phone call, Cave, who called himself a huge fan of Johnson’s book, said he watched the movie “with one hand over my eyes just because I thought they might’ve done a terrible job of it.” He laughed. “But within a few minutes, I just eased into it. I was very moved.”

He said the song’s lyrics, which lay out a succession of stark images from Robert Grainier’s world, came to him as he slept after seeing the film. “It was a gift from a fever dream,” he said.

As a parent who’s lost two sons, did Cave identify with Edgerton’s portrayal of a father in mourning?

“Very much so,” he said, adding that he’d first read Johnson’s book years ago, before his teenage son Arthur died in an accidental fall from a cliff near the family’s home in Brighton, England. “Obviously, it was a book about grief, but it didn’t affect me in that way. Then I read it again — no, actually, I listened to Will Patton’s audiobook, which is a work of art in itself — and suddenly it wasn’t something I read from a distance.” (Bentley’s movie employs Patton’s narration in voice-over.)

Asked whether he has a favorite line from Cave’s song, Dessner — who hears “Train Dreams” in a kind of conversation with the singer’s latest album, “Wild God” — picked the song’s chorus, in which Cave sings, “I can’t begin to tell you how that feels.”

“It’s like the whole film, in a way,” the composer said. “It’s about what art can do.”

Dessner and his brother grew up in Cincinnati, where Bryce was playing flute and classical guitar by the time he was 12 or 13.

“He was also really good at math,” Aaron recalled. “The combination of those things always felt related to me.”

For the Dessners, music was “just what you did as suburban kids at a time when there was nothing to do,” Bryce said. “You either do drugs or you play music.”

Bryce joined the National in New York after earning a master’s degree from the Yale School of Music. (The band’s other members are singer Matt Berninger and a second set of brothers in bassist Scott Devendorf and drummer Bryan Devendorf.)

Aaron Dessner, left, Matt Berninger and Bryce Dessner of the National perform in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2022.

(Roberto Ricciuti / Redferns via Getty Images)

“It was a little bit of an accident that we ended up in a band that got popular,” Aaron said, but that’s definitely what happened. By the mid-2000s, the National’s albums were regularly topping critics’ lists; by 2011, the band was headlining the Hollywood Bowl.

Bryce got seriously into film music after Iñárritu heard a piece he composed for Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Phil in 2014; the director called him the next day, Dessner recalled, and asked him to work on “The Revenant.”

These days, the members of the National are “really enjoying a break,” Dessner said, after dropping two albums in 2023 and touring behind them in 2024. He’s confident the band will come back together but figures it’ll be a year or so before he and his bandmates get anything going again.

Until then, he’s focusing on concert music — “I just got asked to write a concerto for the ondes martenot,” he said, referring to the early electronic instrument Greenwood famously used on Radiohead’s experimental “Kid A” album — and occasionally collaborating with his brother on Aaron’s pop productions.

“Bryce is always going to do something interesting in any setting,” said Aaron, who recently asked him to orchestrate a song for Florence + the Machine.

And of course there’s the long road to the Oscars with the quiet but powerful “Train Dreams.”

“I’m kind of excited to be a fly on the wall in a room with Spielberg and Scorsese and all these people,” he said ahead of the Golden Globes.

As awards season kicks into gear, does Dessner harbor any hope of somehow triumphing over the world-conquering “Golden”?

“I have to say yes,” he replied with a laugh. “But no.”

From Game of Thrones to Killing Eve, the Prince and Princess of Wales are big fans of TV – but one 92% rated espionage thriller has captured Princess Catherine’s attention

As the winter chill sets in, many of us are opting for cosy nights in front of the telly rather than braving the cold outdoors, and seems likely that Prince William and Kate Middleton are dooing something similar.

While Royal enthusiasts eagerly anticipate more appearances from the Prince and Princess of Wales, particularly as she marks a year of cancer remission this month, it’s likely that Catherine will be looking forward to some downtime at home.

However, as the Princess of Wales rings in her 44th birthday, there’s a bit of a dampener – no confirmed release date for the second series of one of her favourite TV shows, a spy thriller boasting an impressive 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Black Doves, a gripping espionage series masterminded by Joe Barton for Netflix, was one of December 2024’s standout hits and was greenlit for a second series before its inaugural season had even concluded.

The series, starring big names like Keira Knightley, Ben Wishaw, and Sarah Lancashire, revolves around a group of freelance spies whose cover is threatened. Black Doves zeroes in on undercover agent Helen Webb, portrayed by Oscar nominee Kiera Knightley, who finds her covert identity at risk after her lover is killed by figures within London’s criminal underworld.

The programme captivated audiences, with one typical response online stating: “I thought Black Doves on Netflix was pretty good and entertaining. Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw are great as a team of clandestine spies and assassins. Absolutely deserves the second season. Can’t wait.”

Another viewer gushed: “Black Doves was fantastic television. So damn good! !” A third added: “If you love a British political/espionage thriller, Black Doves is a masterpiece. Slick script, superb characters, smashing storyline. Heavy on irony and good old fashioned violence.”

This marks another occasion where William and Kate have revealed their television tastes. During a trip to the BAFTA offices in central London, where he discovered details about a bursary granted in his honour, William admitted his passion for the Jason Bourne series.

When encountering Paul Greengrass, who helmed three of the six films, William enthusiastically enquired “another Bourne, another Bourne”. The filmmaker allegedly replied with chuckling and a head shake.

Swiss filmmaker Edward Berger was linked to the project for several months but subsequently declared “It’s really not clear whether… I’m doing that film or not”. Currently, the prospects for William’s cherished Bourne franchise appear uncertain.

Another William and Catherine favourite facing an unclear future is the BBC’s hit series Killing Eve, starring Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh. During a 2019 visit to a BAFTA exhibition, William reportedly confessed his fondness for the series.

Show producer Sally Woodward Gentle and costume designer Phoebe de Gaye revealed that the prince “apparently… has watched it all”.

“He [Prince William] said he loved it. He talked about the dark humour of it, and Jodie [Comer] and Sandra [Oh], how amazing they both are. And he talked about the humour you get through the costumes, which is what Phoebe is so clever at,” Gentle disclosed.

Whilst the programme concluded with its fourth series in 2022, persistent speculation continues about a potential spin-off, possibly centred on the early years of Fiona Shaw’s character, Carolyn Martens.

Prince William has revealed that he and Kate, 42, were equally keen on watching episodes of Game of Thrones. The Royal pair even told actor Tom Wlaschiha, famous for playing Jaquan H’ghar in the drama, that they have “watched every series”.

Speaking on BBC Radio 1 in 2017, William declared their passion for the programme, describing them as “big fans” and advising: “You should definitely watch Game of Thrones, that’s worth watching.”

Beyond television, Prince William is recognised for his love of music, an interest he shares with his children, George and Charlotte. He disclosed on Apple’s Time To Walk podcast in December 2023 that the youngsters frequently bicker over song choices during their morning routines.

The musical inclinations of the Wales family were put in the spotlight when William, accompanied by Charlotte and George, made international headlines after snapping a selfie with pop superstar Taylor Swift. Marking his 42nd birthday, the future monarch was spotted having a grand time at Swift’s concert at Wembley Stadium with his children.

There was no shortage of engrossing art with which to engage in Southern California museums during the past year, although the considerable majority of it had been made only within the past 50 years or so. Art’s global history before the Second World War continues to play a decided second fiddle to contemporary art in special exhibitions.

Our picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.

The chief exception: the Getty, where its Brentwood anchor and Pacific Palisades outpost accounted for three of the 10 most engrossing museum exhibitions in 2025, all 10 presented here in order of their opening dates. (Four are still on view.)

Art museums across the country continue to struggle in attendance and fundraising after the double-whammy of the lengthy COVID-19 pandemic shut-down followed by culture war attacks from the Trump administration. That may help explain the unusually lengthy, seven- to 14-month duration of half of these shows.

Gustave Caillebotte, “Floor Scrapers,” 1875, oil on canvas.

(Musée d’Orsay
)

Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men. Getty Center

An emphasis on men’s daily lives is very unusual in French Impressionist art. Women are more prominent as subject matter in scores of paintings by marquee names like Monet, Cassatt and Degas. But homosocial life in late-19th century Paris was the fascinating focus of this show, the first Los Angeles museum survey of Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings in 30 years.

A view into a dance gallery is framed by Guadalupe Rosales’ “Concourse/C3” installation.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

Guadalupe Rosales – Tzahualli: Mi Memoria en Tu Reflejo. Palm Springs Art Museum

Vibrant Chicano youth subcultures of 1990s Los Angeles, during the fraught era of Rodney King and the AIDS epidemic, are embedded in the art of one of its enthusiastic participants. Guadalupe Rosales layers her archival work onto pleasure and freedom today, as was seen in this vibrant exhibition, offering a welcome balm during another period of outsized social distress.

Don Bachardy, “Christopher Isherwood,” June 20, 1979; acrylic on paper.

(Don Bachardy Paper / Huntington Library)

Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits. The Huntington

The nearly 70-year retrospective of portrait drawings in pencil and paint by Los Angeles artist Don Bachardy revealed the works to be like performances: Both artist and sitter participated in putting on a pictorial show. The extended visual encounter between two people, its intimacy inescapable, culminates in the two “actors” autographing their performed picture.

“Probably Shakyamuni, the Historical Buddha,” China, Tang Dynasty, circa 700-800; marble.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia. LACMA. Through July 12

“Realms of the Dharma” isn’t exactly an exhibition. Instead, it’s a temporary, 14-month installation of Buddhist sculptures, paintings and drawings from the museum’s impressive permanent collection, plus a few additions. It’s worth noting here, though, because almost all of its marvelous pieces were in storage (or traveling) for more than seven years, during the lengthy tear-down of a prior LACMA building and construction of a new one, and much of it will disappear again when the installation closes next summer.

Noah Davis, “40 Acres and a Unicorn,” 2007, acrylic and gouache on canvas.

(Anna Arca)

Noah Davis. UCLA Hammer Museum

A tight survey of 50 works, all made by Noah Davis in the brief span between 2007 and the L.A.-based artist’s untimely death in 2015 at just 32, told a poignant story of rapid artistic growth brutally interrupted. Davis was a painter’s painter, a deeply thoughtful and idiosyncratic Black voice heard by other artists and aficionados, even while still in invigorating development.

Weegee (Arthur Fellig), “The Gay Deceiver, 1939/1950, gelatin silver print. Getty Museum

(Getty Museum)

Queer Lens: A History of Photography. Getty Center

Assembling some 270 photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries, “Queer Lens” looked at work produced after the 1869 invention of the binaries of “heterosexual and homosexual,” just a short generation after the 1839 invention of the camera. Transformations in the expression of gender and sexuality by scores of artists as well-known as Berenice Abbott, Anthony Friedkin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray and Edmund Teske were tracked along with more than a dozen unknowns.

“Sealstone With a Battle Scene (The Pylos Combat Agate),” Minoan, 1630-1440 BC; banded agate, gold and bronze.

(Jeff Vanderpool)

The Kingdom of Pylos: Warrior-Princes of Ancient Greece. Getty Villa. Through Jan. 12

The star of this look into the ancient, not widely known Mycenaean kingdom of Pylos was a tiny agate, barely 1.3 inches wide, making its public debut outside Europe. The exquisitely carved stone, unearthed by archaeologists in 2017, shows two lean but muscled warriors going at it over the sprawled body of a dead comrade. Perhaps made in Crete, the idealized naturalism of a battle scene rendered in shallow three-dimensional space threw a stylistic monkey-wrench into our established understanding of Greek culture 3,500 years ago.

Ken Gonzales-Day digitally erased Illinois Black lynching victim Charlie Mitchell from an 1897 postcard to focus instead on the perpetrators.

(USC Fisher Museum of Art)

Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade.” USC Fisher Museum of Art. Through March 14

The ways in which identities of race, gender and class are erased in a society dominated by straight white patriarchy animates the first mid-career survey of Los Angeles–based artist Ken Gonzales-Day. The riveting centerpiece is his extensive meditation on the American mass-hysteria embodied by the horrific practice of lynching, in which Gonzales-Day employed digital techniques to erase the brutalized victims (and the ropes) in grisly photographs of the murders. Focus shifts the viewer’s gaze toward the perpetrators — an urgent and timely transference, given the shredding of civil society underway today.

Kara Walker deconstructed a monument to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson for “Unmanned Drone,” as seen at the Brick gallery as part of “Monuments.”

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

Monuments. The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick. Through May 3

The nearly two-year delay in opening “Monuments,” an exhibition of toppled Confederate and Jim Crow statues that pairs cautionary art history with thoughtful and poetic retorts by a variety of artists, turned out to give the much anticipated undertaking an especially potent punch. As the Trump Administration restores a white supremacist sheen to “Lost Cause” mythology by renaming military installations after Civil War traitors and returning sculptures and paintings of them to prior perches, from which they had been removed, this sober and incisive analysis of what’s at stake is nothing less than crucial.

Peak moment: As a metaphor of white supremacy, Kara Walker’s transformation of the ancient “man on a horse” motif into a monstrous headless horseman — a Euro-American corpse that tortures the living and refuses to die — resonates loudly.

Installation view of sculptures and a painting by Robert Therrien at the Broad.

(Joshua White / Broad museum)

Robert Therrien: This Is a Story. The Broad. Through April 5

The late Los Angeles-based artist Robert Therrien (1947-2019) had a distinctive, even quirky capacity for teasing out a conceptual space between ordinary domestic objects and their mysterious personal meanings. In 120 paintings, drawings, photographs and especially sculptures, this Therrien exhibition offers objects hovering somewhere between immediately recognizable and perplexingly alien, wryly funny and spiritually profound.

If the Shakers have a lasting cultural legacy, it is their music — most famously “Simple Gifts,” the uplifting spiritual Aaron Copland immortalized in his ballet “Appalachian Spring.” It stands to reason, then, that a film about Ann Lee, the founding “mother” of this 18th century celibate Christian sect, would be a musical. But this was no conventional woman and “The Testament of Ann Lee,” directed by Mona Fastvold and opening in L.A. on Dec. 25, is no ordinary musical.

“Ann Lee was very radical and extreme,” says composer Daniel Blumberg, “and Mona is as well.”

As conceived by Fastvold and Blumberg, the entire tapestry of this film is musicalized — from the emphatic breathing, chest thumping and floor stomping that make up the worshipers’ rituals, to the songs, inspired by Shaker traditionals and performed by star Amanda Seyfried and the cast. Even the sounds of wind, the creaking of ships and a passing cow play a part.

“This cow walks past during the song ‘I Love Mother,’” says Blumberg, 35, visiting L.A. from his native England and speaking from a hotel room over Zoom. Bald with severe features but a soft and guileless disposition, he’s fidgety about the whole Hollywood press dance — this is only his fourth feature film score. But Blumberg is eager to dissect his music-making process and brag about his collaborators. “We were tuning the cows to the song,” he says.

Amanda Seyfried and Lewis Pullman in the movie “The Testament of Ann Lee.”

(Searchlight Pictures)

In a prologue about Lee’s harsh childhood in Manchester, England, her mother hums a tune to her based on the traditional Shaker hymn “Beautiful Treasures.” The melody is then completed on celeste in Blumberg’s score, surrounded by a liturgical choir. The entire film is this kind of holistic musical current: score, songs and environment all in conversation with each other, every component a part of the dance.

“The whole project was very dangerous,” says Blumberg, an indie singer-songwriter with a cult following in the U.K. and now an Oscar for last year’s “The Brutalist.” “It’s always on the edge. And for me that’s a good place to be when you’re making art.”

In one stunning montage, we see a newly married Lee subjugated to religiously-tinged sex (a catalyst for her dogmatic rejection of carnal relations), give birth to several babies, mourn their deaths and express her sorrow in a fervent dance for God. Erotic noises and the cries of childbirth weave together with prayerful moaning and a mother’s keening cries, all integrated into Blumberg’s instrumental score — a guided meditation for bells and strings — with Seyfried singing “Beautiful Treasures.”

“It was very important to me to try and create this hypnotic feel to the film,” says Fastvold, speaking on Zoom from her car during the awards-season whirlwind. “You had to understand it on a sensorial level. Because I think a lot of the appeal, especially early on, were these kinds of endless dance/voice/confession sessions that would last for days.”

“If it’s just someone preaching to you,” she adds, “I certainly can’t connect to that.”

The director, 44, grew up in a secular home in Norway, but her film about this radical American sect is strikingly earnest. Fastvold doesn’t judge Lee’s convictions; there isn’t an ounce of cynicism or condescension. After having a prophetic vision in which Lee is told she is the female incarnation of Jesus Christ, Seyfried sings, “I hunger and thirst / After true righteousness / I hunger and thirst” with utter heart-bleeding sincerity. The camera and the music share her faith completely.

“I never felt like I wanted to laugh at them,” says Fastvold. “I wanted to laugh with them and sometimes their naivete is funny and endearing. But I never wanted to ridicule them. Of course, it’s a very scary thing to try and do.”

When Seyfried read the screenplay two years ago, she experienced some of that intimidation.

“It was definitely the most confused I’ve been in a while reading a script,” she says, nursing a hot tea on Zoom, “because I’m seeing these placeholders for where the hymns will be, when the music comes in, when the diegetic sound goes out or if it doesn’t at all. It was all very foreign to me — which is not necessarily a bad thing. It just leaves me with so many questions.”

Fastvold co-wrote “The Testament of Ann Lee” with her partner, Brady Corbet, who directed “The Brutalist.” They were developing it while working on his breakthrough epic. Blumberg, who has made a number of solo albums and been part of several bands including Cajun Dance Party and Yuck, became friends with Corbet a decade ago. The trio became inseparable.

Fastvold was listening to Blumberg’s records when she decided to direct “The World to Come” in 2020, a warm historical romance about two women in a chilly frontier America. She remembers being captivated by the “beautiful dissonance” in his music. “There’s this mournful, slightly atonal quality to his compositions,” she says.

Fastvold hired Blumberg to score her film — his first — and invited him to the set in Romania to experience the time-traveling feeling of the woods and the sound of passing sheep. She even gave him a small on-screen part, selling a blue dress to Katherine Waterston’s character. It was emblematic of her and Corbet’s then-burgeoning philosophy: of making lavish films on a shoestring, using stunning foreign environments to portray a bygone America and roping crew members and family into the collaboration.

For her ambitious follow-up musical about the Shakers, Fastvold knew she needed Blumberg at the ground level, along with choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall, a collaboration that required proximity. “We kind of move in together for a while and just start figuring it out,” Fastvold says.

“The whole project was very dangerous,” says Blumberg. “It’s always on the edge. And for me that’s a good place to be when you’re making art.”

(Ian Spanier / For The Times)

They discussed how to cast a spell on the audience and how, with cinema, “you’ve got these tools to use,” says Blumberg, “with image, sound, the writing of it all and just to push those as far as possible. Obviously with the edit you can move in time very quickly, and then with sound you can bring people into the room that the characters are in, but also bring them into the heavens. It was trying to use the materials that we had to make an experience — with the story, but inside the story as well. An immersive experience.”

Fastvold and Blumberg immersed themselves in the thousands of songs the Shakers left behind, including hymns and what the group called “gift songs” and “dance songs.”

“What is our dialogue with this tradition and what is it that we’re bringing to this conversation?” Fastvold remembers them asking each other. “Because really that, to me, is what folk music is. It’s passed on, it’s transformed — it turns into something else and then passed on again.”

They found several Shaker songs that fit the needs of given scenes and moments; whenever they couldn’t, Blumberg wrote an original. The Jewish composer recalled the niguns — wordless, improvised prayers — that he grew up hearing in synagogue, and he drew on that sense memory. Many Shaker songs are mantra-like prayers addressed to God, simple rising and falling melodies based on a short repeated phrase. Blumberg got creative with the harmonies, creating demos that he sang himself.

“It was very nerve-racking,” he says, “because score is a moment where you can fix things — you do it after the edit — but this was going to define the pace of the film. There’s quite high stakes of it working.”

Seyfried was nervous too. Even though she’s a trained singer, with film credits including “Mamma Mia!” and “Les Misérables,” this peculiar religious epic required an enormous leap of faith.

“I knew Mona was going to shoot it beautifully,” Seyfried says, “and I knew that Daniel was going to be there every step of the way. And I knew that I was in good hands — but I didn’t know at that point that I could trust myself as a singer, as a musician. It was completely new territory for me. Terrifying.”

The songs were prerecorded for playback on set. The first thing Seyfried recorded in studio was an a cappella song for a scene late in the film — the lyric is “How can I but love my dear faithful children?” She says she felt miserable.

“I was just like: I sound terrible,” Seyfried says sincerely. “This song is not fun to sing. It’s beautiful, but I don’t sound beautiful. I don’t like the way I sound. And we kept doing it and my voice was dry.”

Blumberg patiently worked at finding the most comfortable key for her voice. “I had no idea how lucky I was,” she says.

Amanda Seyfried in the movie “The Testament of Ann Lee.”

(TIFF)

In the process of working with Blumberg, Seyfried says she came to a deeper appreciation of the character as well as her own singing voice. “I was so critical of it,” she remembers, but the role gave her a different kind of freedom. “I was playing somebody who didn’t necessarily have to be a beautifully trained singer,” she says. “She sang because she wanted to feel alive, and she wanted to feel free, and she wanted to feel connected to her faith — and that already just liberates the performer.”

After extensive rehearsals that continued throughout production, Fastvold shot the film in Budapest. Blumberg was always on set, accompanying the actors with a small keyboard. (Thomasin McKenzie and Lewis Pullman are among the cast members who also sing in the film.) Sometimes the actors had a simple click track in an earpiece, other times a “stomp track” from the foot choreography. They would sing live in addition to lip-syncing to playback and Fastvold amassed a huge variety of live tracks — vocals, breaths and other bodily sounds — for her final mix.

“I wanted all of that life and that natural feel to it,” she says, “to not have it feel polished at all, to just be really raw. Because they weren’t singing to entertain. It’s never performative. It’s always from this place of prayer or pain.”

With her principal cast surrounded by Hungarian extras, Fastvold roped everyone, from the dialect coach to the first assistant director’s son to Blumberg’s sister, into the dance.

“If you came to visit, you were in the movie,” she says. “The cast is the crew and the crew is the cast. It’s how I like to do it.” Once again, Daniel Blumberg appears on-screen, in scenes of Shaker worship; he also sings an original duet, “Clothed by the Sun,” with Seyfried under the end credits.

But at this point his work was only half done. Armed with a cut of the film, pillared by the songs he wrote and arranged, Blumberg crafted a score that subtly teed up song melodies and established a sense of spiritual trance. He gravitated toward the sound of bells; he and Fastvold found a handbell from Ann’s era that they used in early demos and he ended up renting some 50 church bells, in different keys, all laid out on the floor of his London flat.

He extended the bell idea with the jangly celeste, also known as a bell piano, and he augmented those bells with a small string ensemble, a choir and, at one point, even an electric guitar.

It was Blumberg’s idea to have two veteran improvising singers, Phil Menton and Maggie Nichols (who also appears in the film), to each record a track where they improvised along to the entire film. Working with mixer Steve Single, Fastvold and Blumberg would occasionally bring up one of these stems and layer it into the rest of the soundtrack for an added color.

“We’d say, ‘Let’s hear what Maggie was doing at this point,’” Blumberg says, “and then we’d bring up her stem and be like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if she follows that character there?’ Or, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if she’s humming outside the window?’ Or if it’s almost like the heavens speaking down on Ann?”

The final result is utterly unique to Blumberg and Fastvold, a period character study by way of trance and an experiential approximation of religious fervor. By exploring a distant and somewhat alien community through the device of music, they somehow tapped into something universal.

One of Blumberg’s favorite moments in the film is a scene where a group of sailors, transporting Lee and her disciples to the new world, shout at the Shakers to stop singing. “They really sound like this out-of-tune rabble, and you hear what maybe other people might have heard,” he says. “And then a few minutes later they’re praying on the ship and I’ve used all these reverbs and there’s all these choirs singing in the background — it’s almost like what they felt from within.”

Like the Shakers and their songs and prized furniture, “Ann Lee” was made with craft and care by a small and familial utopian community of its own.

“There were no notes from film people,” says Blumberg. “It was our bubble. So the only fear was just them trying to release it and everyone going, ‘No, that’s just mad.’ But what I was trying to do from the start was: If I got to something that seemed good, how can I push that further? Like, really trying to push everything to the extreme.”

Are you a true fan of the fan-favourite sitcom set to make a striking comeback this Christmas or just another Scrappy Doo? Take the 30-question quiz below to find out!

It wouldn’t be Christmas Day without a fun family quiz, and this Gavin and Stacey game will really put your sitcom knowledge to the test. Whether you’re competitive or just having a bit of fun, it’s a good way to get the family together today.

Penned by Ruth Jones and James Corden – who portray the love-hate relationship of Nessa Jenkins and Neil ‘Smithy’ Smith – the popular show returned to our screens last Christmas after five years since the suspenseful ending where Nessa proposed to Smithy on one knee.

So how well-versed are you in the popular telly show? Put your knowledge to the test with our ultimate Gavin and Stacey quiz….