Mona Fastvold on ‘The Testament of Ann Lee,’ Returning to Venice

Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet’s daughter Ada has attended seven editions of the Venice Film Festival. She’s 10 years old.

It’s something Fastvold claims they only recently realized. “I feel like she’s grown up at the festival,” she says.

While an impressive — not to mention cute — statistic, it merely serves to underscore the incredible run this powerhouse indie filmmaking couple have had on the Lido, where they’ve debuted four of six films they’ve made together, including last year’s epic “The Brutalist” (directed by Corbet, who co-wrote with Fastvold). Venice became a springboard into awards season glory (and a somewhat sweaty springboard — due to 2024’s intense heat Fastvold says she “passed out for a tiny bit” at the early afternoon premiere.)

This year makes it five films, as Fastvold takes over the director’s chair with competition entry “The Testament of Ann Lee” (co-written with Corbet).

Speaking to Variety from her native Norway after finishing post-production, Fastvold describes the film, starring Amanda Seyfried in the title role, as a “speculative retelling” of the life of Lee, the founder of Christian sect the Shakers. In 1774, Lee emigrated from the U.K. with eight followers and, as the director notes, “created the largest utopian society in American history with complete equality between men and women and all races and backgrounds.”

The feature is also a musical, but “not a straight musical,” nor is it a “straight biopic.” Seyfried, who spent a year preparing for the role, sings, possibly for the first time on screen since 2012’s “Les Miserables.”

There are clear parallels between “Ann Lee” and “The Brutalist,” and not merely for a focus on persecuted European emigres seeking a better life in the New World. On paper, both appear unlikely filmmaking propositions. Indeed, much has been written about the seven years it took to get the wheels moving on “The Brutalist,” about a fictitious Holocaust-surviving architect and the first movie with an intermission to become a major awards contender since “Gandhi.”

“Ann Lee” had a similar journey. Fastvold says there was initially “zero interest” from the industry in her not-quite musical, not-quite biopic about an obscure 18th century religious leader. When Seyfried expressed a desire to play Lee, she warned her friend: “I will pay you nothing, you’re going to work very hard and it’s going to be a very uncomfortable experience for you.”

Fastvold herself persevered out of fascination for the subject. The Shakers — only two members remain, largely due to the sect’s dedication to celibacy — became known for their utilitarian design and architecture that prioritized functionality, simplicity and craftsmanship. What interested Fastvold was their “collaborative spirit” and a laborious, near-fanatical pursuit of perfection in what they created. It was a pursuit she recognized.

“There’s something about doing things — like these very, very difficult films that nobody wants until they’re made — that really spoke to me as an artist,” she says with a laugh. “There’s an obsession there.”

“Ann Lee” was shooting under the radar when “The Brutalist” premiered in Venice last year. Fastvold gave herself just 48 hours at the festival before flying back to the set in Budapest (where she’d been the previous summer filming “The Brutalist”). When the awards season noise surrounding the film erupted soon after, Fastvold and Corbet simply took “Ann Lee” with them on the circuit.

“I was editing the whole time we were campaigning. I’d edit, edit, edit and then on the weekends would do Q&As with Brady,” Fastvold says, adding that she came to love the contrast of promoting one project while working on another. “However much of a privilege it is to get to talk about your films, which neither of us have ever done to that extent, the real joy is to make them. We’re both awkward and prefer to be behind the camera — we both chose to leave acting behind for good reason! — so it’s wonderful to just disappear into the edit.”

“The Brutalist” wound up with a healthy haul of honors, including three Oscars, four BAFTAs and three Golden Globes, alongside almost unanimous acclaim.

“It was all a beautiful gift and hopefully makes it a little bit easier for us to make more movies,” says Fastvold. But has it? “We don’t know yet.”

The offers of other work, as they tends to do following a major awards hit like “The Brutalist,” did come through. But that’s not why Fastvold and Corbet — who as directors have now had two features each in competition in Venice — labored over the film.

“What are you going to do, spend four years directing a movie about superheroes?” she says. “No offense to anyone who does, I’m sure it’s very fun. But there’s that obsessive, compulsive need to just create something… a little Shaker spirit. So we’re just gonna keep making our films.”

And they’re films that Fastvold and Corbet’s daughter Ada — even at the tender age of 10 — now doesn’t simply watch being made in her summer holidays (and often appears in as an extra), but happily watches at their Venice premieres.

She may have been too young to appreciate her mother’s first time at the festival as director with 2020’s “The World to Come.” “She was little so was just doing cartwheels in the corridors outside,” Fastvold recalls. But she did sit through all 3 hours and 35 minutes of “The Brutalist” and its standing ovation (either 12 or 13 minutes, depending on who you believe). “She liked it — which was nice,” says Fastvold, who notes that she did lean over to “cover her eyes a couple of times” during the not-so family friendly scenes.

As for “The Testament of Ann Lee,” Ada has only seen “bits and pieces of it in the edit,” says Fastvold. “I’ve saved the whole experience for her in Venice.”