Construction of Havencrest Castle in Savanna, Illinois began in 1979, though the foundation had been built far earlier when Alan St. George first laid eyes on his future wife Adrianne Blue Wakefield from a bus window. While such an instant connection may be a mystery to those who haven’t experienced it, the two were soon completing sentences for one another and setting about creating the kind of house that designed just for them, exuberant and sprawling not far from where they spent their childhood, but then again, a world away.
In “Adrianne and the Castle,” it really does feel like stepping into another dimension as director Shannon Walsh invites one into the 63-room estate that has drawn visitors from around the globe and the rich mahogany panels and regal ruby red carpeting reflects a continually vibrant romance despite the fact that Adrianne passed on in 2006, with Alan still inspired to add onto the house by her memory. He paints frescos and creates bronze and aluminum sculptures, all moved by her spirit and although he never seems to need much to bring her to mind, Walsh and co-writer Laurel Sprengelmeyer honor the couple’s devotion to creatively expressing their love for one another by creating a real dialogue between the two in showing the preparations for a musical about their life together where Alan engages with those involved in the performance and the back-and-forth stirs new remembrances.
As Adrianne was known to say, “Reality is for those who lack imagination,” and Walsh may not adhere to traditional nonfiction methodology yet yields something where the truth becomes effervescent, observing the actress hired to play Adrianne in recreations brought to tears when reading her personal journals and inspired by her example to live out loud and Alan continuing to be comforted by his late wife when her presence remains all around him. The experience is bound to be as all-encompassing for audiences who catch the film at its premiere at SXSW this week and before the festival began, Walsh and St. George spoke about their collaboration on this one-of-a-kind film, developing a form of time travel and opening up the doors of Havencrest.
Shannon, what drew you to this?
Shannon Walsh: My best friend Laurel Sprengelmeyer, who is the co-creator of the project and the co-writer, grew up in the neighboring town to where Havencrest Castle is and her sister, Lily, was the first to visit the castle. She told Laurel, “You’ve got to check this out. This is just an amazing place,” and Laurel and her partner, Richard Reed Parry, who did the music for the film, visited and she immediately contacted me and said, “Shannon, we’ve got to make a film about this. This place is magical. Then Laurel and I began communicating with Alan and we talked for quite a while over Zoom, learning his story and of Adrianne, and slowly started to build an idea for a film from there.
Were you immediately open to this, Alan?
Alan St. George: I was open to the idea. I wanted to share Adrianne’s story, but of course, when you’re meeting people for the first time, you have to build up some trust to give them your life story and this went on for quite a period of time because COVID was in there. But there was a lot of time to see how reliable and trustworthy the team was and then it was such a positive experience once we all got together and started filming.
Shannon, at what point do you decide to start rolling the cameras? Because part of the novel approach is pulling the curtain back a bit to work through the emotions of any given scene.
Shannon Walsh: Yeah, straight away, even when Laurel first told me about Havencrest, I thought, “Wow, magical house, interesting couple, but almost everything about their story had happened in the past.” Obviously Alan was still dealing with the loss of his partner, but how do we tell a story when normally in documentary we are telling stories about things that are happening in the present, so in development there was a lot of thinking about what’s the journey that Alan might take now and also learning how fantastical and magical the world that they built for themselves was. How do you capture that in film and allow Alan to tell the story of their meeting with all of the creativity and inspiration that really marked their life? Those factors came together in developing this idea of memory prompts which was getting Alan involved in kind of magical recreations of moments of their life together, using music and some of the images that he told us about when we talked about their story to try to bring to life that past into the present.
What was that experience actually like for you, Alan?
Alan St. George: It was such a deep impact, all of it, the whole process — the doing of it, the making of it, and then the watching of it. That was quite an emotional moment. But the life that Adrianne and I have lived here at Havencrest was a life of imagination. I think of Willy Wonka, but like the sugar-free Willy Wonka, because it’s a world of pure imagination in some ways and instead of a factory that makes chocolate, it’s a factory that makes mascot costumes. And you see some of the mascots because there’s this great dancing scene. Shannon, I don’t know how you put all that together. That would be so overwhelming for me, but she was so calm through this. That was what really surprised me. I would [mentally] be in 10 different places and she’s just focused and calm, nice, and polite.
Part of that vision seems to be also how you parse out an introduction to Adrianne and the castle throughout the film, allowing them both to have a certain mystery about them that’s gradually revealed. What was it like creating that sense of discovery?
Shannon Walsh: When Laurel and I thought about how we would tell the story, it was obviously so important that the spirit of Adrianne would be in every frame of film because she is everywhere in Alan’s life, and it’s a film about her, although of course it’s very much about Alan as well. In some early conversations we had with Alan, he would describe her as the Aurora Borealis or this idea of light and electricity and we started to kind of play with those ideas, thinking about refractions and how to bring to life through the music and also through visuals.
Of course, Havencrest Castle is also a main character and you have to visit the place because the film gives you a glimpse, but just barely, so there’s so much more to see. But of course that place is such a centerpiece to what makes this story so fascinating and also the artistry of Alan that still blows my mind to this day. He’s way too humble about it. but it’s just overwhelmingly beautiful and we knew those two pieces were gonna be the central threads of the film.
I really worked a lot with the [director of photography] Pablo Alvarez-Mesa to think about how we would shoot, for example with a kind of ghost-like floating camera moving through the house that could still bring Adrianne in this almost spirited way and then making sure that she was really there in every frame. We’d actually filmed some other people and [thought] could we bring some different voices in? But the edit room sometimes has this magical quality in which it [could feel] like maybe it was Adrianne there with us, and it was just like “Nope, Adrianne has to be part of everything and that’s it and everybody else was out.” So other than Alan, the film continued to demand the presence of Havencrest and Adrian in every scene.
I was so happy to see that you had an end credit for Adrianne acknowledging “Guidance from the Afterlife.”
Alan St. George: Yeah, that was a nice surprise to see. And Shannon, you and Laurel did have at least one time where you felt like Adrianne was giving you some guidance more than once, right?
Shannon Walsh: Alan and I really connected a lot in the early days. The very first development shoot was only months after I lost my father to COVID, and it was just such a divine intervention to bring us together to talk about loss and grief and love, and also that permeability of the very thin veil between whatever the other world is and where we are now. So I really felt Adrianne’s presence throughout, and we really felt like we needed to ask her permission. Normally in a doc, you ask people, are we allowed to do this? We felt the same with Adrianne [where] we really needed to say, “We come with open hearts and we want to tell your story.” That was a lot what Alan brought to us in the way that you think about Adrianne and how she lives within your life still, and that’s something that we really learned from you that I feel like is quite beautiful. She’s very much here with us and she’ll be there with us at the screening in Austin, most certainly.
Alan St. George: Yes, she will be for sure. She would be thrilled.
It’s transcendent in a number of ways and the music seems to be a big part of that. What was it like working with Richard Reed Parry on this?
Shannon Walsh: Richard was such a phenomenal collaborator and it’s so rare for a documentary that he was starting to conceptualize the music [before we started to film]. He’d been to Havencrest and loved it, so he actually came on set with us for many of the musical scenes and actually composed music and then was working on set with the actors and bringing musical cues along, so the music was such a part of the shooting. It wasn’t a post-production thing, which is often the way in film that you put in the music after. It was really important to me to work in an iterative way with Richard, so we were bouncing ideas and thinking about music as we thought about how we would shoot the scenes.
And Laurel, the co-creator, is also a musician, so from early on, she really brought that musical sensibility. We knew that this moment when Alan sees Adrianne for the first time, for example, just the way he described it to us felt musical, and Adrianne loved musicals and their world had a lot of musicals as part of them, so it really felt it was honoring to their story to bring that together. Raquel Acevedo-Klein, this incredible vocalist, did the vocal arrangements and collaborated with Richard on some of the music and she’s actually the voice that you hear in the film. She’s a rising composer based out of New York and we just kept bringing these incredibly magical people together.
Alan, as you mentioned, it must’ve been a pretty powerful experience seeing it all come together. What’s it like to have your life with Adrianne reflected back to you in this way?
Alan St. George: It’s very powerful and impactful to see yourself on screen in these archival clips from when I was 22 years old in these wedding photos and then it is juxtaposed with this 71-year-old guy because you’re cutting from one to the other sometimes. Most of us don’t look at our old photos much and I haven’t seen those old videos since they were made back in the ’70s, ’80s, and ‘90s, so to see them now next to how I am now, it’s a marker of your life and I’m in act three now, so then it makes you think about what am I going to do with the rest of this act three? It has a profound effect to see that.
You’re so generous for opening up your home for so many years, and now for sharing this beautiful relationship that you had, and Shannon, what’s it like to get this out into the world?
Shannon Walsh: We really hope that people will connect with the film and in a way their story is so unique, but it’s also such a universal story. Every one of us has experienced some kind of loss and love and this way that we move through the world. I really learned a lot from Alan and from Adrianne making this film that really gives me a lot of hope for the future and for my life, so I hope that the audience will take that away.
“Adrianne & The Castle” will screen at SXSW on March 9th at 9:15 pm at the Alamo Lamar 6, March 11th at 5:45 pm at the Violet Crown Cinema 1 and 6:15 pm at Violet Crown Cinema 3 and March 13th at 11:15 am at the Violet Crown Cinema 2 and 11:45 am at Violet Crown Cinema 4.