When director Mona Fastvold asked Daniel Blumberg to write the music for her 2020 feature The World to Come, Blumberg had never scored a film before. At the time he was best known as an indie musician behind cult favourite bands like Yuck and Cajun Dance Party. He was a lover of cinema, but asked Fastvold if he should listen to soundtracks to prepare.
“She was like, ‘No — I think it's fine,’” he remembers over a Zoom call.
She was clearly right. Five years later, Blumberg has an Oscar for his work on The Brutalist, co-written by Fastvold with her husband Brady Corbet and directed by Corbet. And just after he finished that epic score, a roaring engine propelling you into the story of a Holocaust survivor's battles with the American dream, Blumberg and Fatsvold embarked on what is their most ambitious project to date.
Fastvold recruited Blumberg to compose the score and songs for The Testament of Ann Lee, her bio-musical about the life of Ann Lee, leader of the Shakers, a religious group that flourished in the second half of the 18th century. Taking lyrics from Shaker hymns, together Fastvold and Blumberg created a portrait of religious ecstasy to dramatise how Ann, played by Amanda Seyfried, emerges from personal tragedy to become a dogmatic and beguiling figure, advocating celibacy but finding orgasmic pleasure in the physicality of prayer.
“It's like a poem about the Shakers,” Blumberg says of the film. “It's not a documentary.”
For Blumberg, who also appears briefly onscreen as a member of Mother Ann's flock, The Testament of Ann Lee represented a turning point for his career in film. It was the most involved he'd ever been with a movie, from inception point to finish.
“I mean, I wasn't in bed with Brady and Mona when they were writing the script,” he says, before adding cheekily, “I was in bed with them afterwards.”
Blumberg cuts an intimidating figure; he has an angular, almost ancient-looking face that often appears incredibly serious. But his dry wit courses through our conversation, during which he smokes a handrolled cigarette. Despite his recent elevation to the elites of film composers, he remains dedicated to doing things his own way, with the same spirit that's guided his entire artistic life.
The musician had little time to rest between finishing his award-winning material for The Brutalist and starting to develop Ann Lee; he knew he would have to have the songs set for the latter before the film went into production in Budapest.
His first bout of inspiration came around Christmas 2023. He was trying to hold off on starting anything for Ann Lee before finishing The Brutalist, but had to come up with a piece for a teaser they made to try to get funding.
"I was trying to find a stamping sound," he says. "When I stamped on the floor of my flat it's like concrete, but then I found this wooden box." Later that day, he went to spend Christmas with his friend Celia Hewitt, the widow of British poet Adrian Mitchell. He would eventually dedicate the score to Hewitt, who died when he was on set, but at the time she was watching a performance by avant garde vocalist Phil Minton.
"Phil Minton was the first voice I heard when I read the script," Blumberg remembers.
Blumberg, who is Jewish, didn't know much about the Shakers before he started intensely researching their music, but he recognised some of the hymns that were in their songbook because of how they would draw from all different contexts. He deliberately wanted to capture the somewhat improvisational, communal feel that he perceived in their work.
"They definitely didn't audition people who could sing," he says. "They were a very welcoming community. I know what it sounds like when a group of people come together to sing from synagogue and stuff and some voices are strong."
He felt he had a bit of a license, he says, to go and make the music his own while respecting the existing history of the Shakers. The Shakers didn't use instrumentation, but he brought in more intricate chords. He relied on the sound of bells because he knew there were bells in the Shaker settlement as well as in Manchester, where Ann was raised. He also wanted to capitalise on the sounds of the body — slapping and stomping that would come from worship, choreographed on screen by Celia Rowlson-Hall. During an intense moment of chaos in the film, when a fire breaks out, there are hundreds of hand bells ringing all at once.
He also found inspiration in his star. At times he uses her isolated, haunting soprano without any instrumentation.
"I loved that it was Amanda, who has this kind of aura about her, as a person, and the way she looks and the way she sounds," he says. "It related to how we wanted to follow this impressive person."
Blumberg met with Seyfried very early in the process, and the actress also trained with vocal improviser Shelley Hirsch. Still, Blumberg and his star had to constantly work during production. They even did sessions at his Airbnb during shooting, with Blumberg recording on a portable set up.
"Amanda was living on my street in Hungary so she could just walk over when she had a bit of spare time, and she did not have a lot of spare time," he says. Fastvold would then come after a day on set to listen to their work.
Blumberg took on his small role in the film in part because that's just Fastvold's way, inviting everyone into the process. His sister, he says, came to visit for a bit and ended up doing three days of work on the film.
"I mean I always just agree to whatever they want, Brady and Mona, and then sometimes I'm like, 'Why the hell am I doing this?'" he jokes.
Blumberg recognises that his Oscar for The Brutalist has put him on the radar of Hollywood types, but he is determined to choose projects as he would in any circumstance. Outside of his collaborations with Corbet and Fastvold he composed the score for Gianfranco Rosi's lyrical documentary about Naples, Below the Clouds, which will be in cinemas next year.
“I decide what I do in the same way that I've always decided what I do,” he says. “The aim is to try and be engaged with work and my life is kind of my work, really. It's not like, ‘Oh, when I finish this project I can go on holiday.’”
