Filmmakers Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet got candid about the challenges of independent cinema while at the Venice Film Festival with their sweeping musical drama “The Testament of Ann Lee.” Their latest collaboration — directed by Fastvold, who co-wrote the script with Corbet — explores the founding leader of the Shakers, a radical religious movement known for worshipping through ecstatic song and movement. It’s a focus on this lesser-known chapter of American history, which means the movie wasn’t the most obvious sell to financiers.
“It was quite a feat,” said Corbet at the official press conference, returning with Fastvold to Venice just a year after 2024’s award season darling “The Brutalist.” “As you can imagine, the elevator pitch for ‘Shaker musical’ wasn’t the easiest to get off the ground.”
Producer Andrew Morrison, who worked with the couple on “The Brutalist” and was responsible for cobbling together the lean $10 million price tag for “Ann Lee,” chimed in: “There are easier ones, for sure.” He added, “The goal was for Mona to have complete creative freedom.”
Despite an economical budget, Fastvold wasn’t willing to compromise her grand vision in terms of bringing Ann Lee’s story to the screen. That involved massive set pieces and elaborate musical numbers.
“I thought Ann Lee deserved something grandiose and wonderful,” said Fastvold. “How many stories have we seen about male icons on a grand scale, again and again and again? Can we not see one story about a woman like this?”
Amanda Seyfried stars in the historical drama musical as Ann Lee, the founder of the 18th-century Christian sect the Shakers. Born in Manchester, England, and facing religious persecution, Lee emigrated in 1774 with a small group of followers to the American colonies. There she helped establish a utopian society known for its gender equality, utilitarian design, frenzied singing and celibacy. Fastvold thought of Seyfried, known for movies like “Mean Girls,” “Mamma Mia” and “Les Miserables,” for the title character because of her combination of “kindness and tenderness” as well as “power and madness.”
“Amanda has a lot of power. She’s very strong, a wonderful mother, and she’s a little mad,” Fastvold said. “I knew she could access those things. I saw Amanda was ready to go full force.”
Seyfried described the role as “enlightening and incredibly therapeutic.”
“I’ve never been let loose in this way,” she said. “It was incredible, but also hard to play someone who is a leader.”
Seyfried, prior to the press conference, spoke to Variety about singing on screen for the first time since “Mamma Mia 2” and in a very different — more chant-like — style to anything she’s done before.
“A lot of it was animal sounds as opposed to melodic sounds,” she said, adding that one song took so many tries because she had to “release my shit, my ear, my needs, Amanda’s needs, in order to find the voice that held the passion, the rawness, the grief and the desperation.”
Before the press conference wrapped, the panel of cast and creatives were asked whether there was anyone in modern times who resembled a figure like Ann Lee.
“Mona is the closest,” Corbet said with a laugh. “That’s mother Mona to you, babe.”
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