Mona Fastvold‘s “The Testament of Ann Lee” tells the story, through hymnal music and choreography, of the founding leader of the Shakers as she attempts to create an ecstatic utopia. Fastvold and her husband, producer/co-writer Brady Corbet, shot the Venice competition premiere back-to-back with “The Brutalist” in Hungary.
Like the Corbet-directed Oscar-winning film from last year, the filmmakers also shot “The Testament of Ann Lee” on a budget (here, $10 million) and on film cameras (35mm, blown up to 70mm for maximalist effect). At one point, they took the cast and crew aboard a fully operational 18th century ship they found in Sweden, as Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) takes her followers (including Christopher Abbott as her husband, Lewis Pullman as her brother, and Thomasin McKenzie as her aide) from pre-industrial Manchester, England to colonial rural America.
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Seyfried, Fastvold, Corbet, composer Daniel Blumberg (Oscar winner for “The Brutalist”), choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall (“Vox Lux”), producer Andrew Morrison, and more for the film convened at the Venice Film Festival press conference Monday afternoon ahead of its premiere at the Sala Grande. “The Brutalist” won best director here last year, which makes Fastvold’s second film as a director in the Venice competition (after 2020’s “The World to Come”) one of the festival’s hottest acquisition titles.
Make no mistake that the scale of the movie is massive, emphasizing hands-on, practical filmmaking, from costumer Malgorzata Karpiuk designing most of the garments by hand to Blumberg and Fastvold working from actual Shaker hymns to craft the songs.
Asked why she wanted to go so big for the story of Ann Lee, Fastvold said, “Well, I thought she deserved it. Don’t you all? Don’t you think that Ann Lee deserved something that was grandiose and wonderful? How many stories have we seen about male icons on a grand scale? How many stories again and again and again? Can we not get to see one story about a woman like this? The only thing I could think of was ‘Jeanne d’Arc,’ that’s it. I just wanted her to have this space.”
One journalist in the room asked Corbet and Fastvold how they decide who will direct a project vs. only write and produce it (they shared writing and producing duties on “The Brutalist” also). Corbet, keeping his shades on indoors, spoke up.
“We firmly believe that you can only serve one master at a time. Mona had final cut on this film, which is something that’s obviously very important to us, and something that we’ve spoken about publicly quite a bit,” he said. “She came to me and said, ‘I want to make a film about Ann Lee.’ We were huge fans of the design, the furniture is absolutely stunning. The architecture is significant, especially in the northeastern part of the United States. It was always Mona’s film. Mona has a background in performing arts and dance, and we realized pretty early on, because the Shakers were a musical people, that the film had to be a musical.”
He continued, “When I have a project I’m working on, I bring it to her and say, OK, this is what I’m doing next. We just sort of go back and forth that way.”
Corbet, who directed second-unit on the film, continued, “I’m working for my director. It’s not because I think a director is always right. It’s because a director is always consistent, and that continuity of vision is significant to me. I’m not interested in watching films that are an exquisite corpse. I’m not interested in those sorts of public art projects where you can end up with something like the body of a mermaid and the face of a dolphin. I want there to be real continuity and consistency in a work of art. When I read a novel, I don’t want to read a novel written by 100 executives; I want to read a novel by one novelist.”
Corbet then turned to producer Andrew Morrison, co-founder of the production company Kaplan, Morrison, who also steered “The Brutalist.” Asked how he got “Ann Lee” off the ground for $10 million, he said, “The goal [was] for [Mona] to have complete creative freedom, for her to get to actualize her vision without any sort of obstruction in her path. How do you make a movie that spans someone’s whole life, that is an epic, that’s a musical, with no constraint and also about a celibate religion that not many people were familiar with before? It was challenging, and we had to find partners who believed in it and supported it.”
“It was quite a feat, because as you can imagine, the elevator pitch for a Shaker musical was not the easiest thing to get off the ground,” Corbet said.
