The Testament of Ann Lee, directed by Mona Fastwold, co-written with her husband Brady Corbet, stars Amanda Seyfried as the leader of the Shakers Christian sect in the late 1700s.
Interviews by Elisa Leonelli
English version of text published in Best Movie, Italy. March 2026 issue
Amanda Seyfried (c) Searchlight
MONA FASTWOLD
Q: The Shakers Christian sect was founded in 1747 in Manchester, England, Ann Lee and a few others emigrated to British North America in 1774. What is your movie saying about their religious beliefs?
MONA: I was raised in a secular household, so for me I am in dialogue with the story I’m telling. Obviously, I’m not trying to convert you all to Shakerism, but at the same time I have a lot of respect for the thoughts that Ann Lee had around equality. She was perhaps the first American woman who fought for complete gender, social, economical and racial equality. All human beings were equal to her, and she wanted to lead from a place of true compassion and love. So those are ideas that I deeply respect. But does the film believe in her or not? I can’t say, and I’m not asking the audience to say, “She’s magical, she’s a saint, she is wonderful.” But you can feel that way, if you want to. Or you can say, “I disagree with her. I think she’s ridiculous, she’s terrible.” Hopefully, we fleshed her out enough and gave enough of her story and of her ideas to have you experience her. In the end, she’s just a human being.
Q: As you describe in the film, Ann Lee grew up poor and illiterate, was forced to marry, became pregnant four times, and suffered greatly when all her children died in childbirth or as infants. Does that explain why she later demanded celibacy of her followers?
MONA: Of course, the enforced celibacy is very complicated, very difficult, and it’s obviously a hard thing to sell to anyone. But at the same time, I understand Ann Lee’s journey to that place, because she experienced so much trauma through childbirth and losing her children. And there’s certainly nothing new about postpartum depression, it’s just new that we’re actually talking about it now. I wanted there to be an ambivalence in her sexuality. Also, in order to find a way to create autonomy for women, Ann Lee needed to rethink what a family unit was and what the gender roles were, what husband and wife were. So at a time when women were considered their husbands’ properties and were still slaves of the men, this religious community was a safe place where they said that all human beings are equal, which is quite attractive. The Shakers were celibate, they believed that the only way that you could reach this state of enlightenment, like in so many other religious communities, was from abstinence, where you could get to a place of purity, and then have a strong connection to the divine. Most human beings are sexual, they want love and companionship, both spiritually and physically. But if they are offered these ecstatic song and dance ways of letting it all out, for some people maybe that was enough.
Q: As a responsible and political filmmaker, did you want to draw some parallels between this past and the present, and express your thoughts about today’s world?
MONA: For me, telling a story about the past is really about being in dialogue with the now and with the future, because history repeats itself. I wish we had gotten further along within all of those topics than where we are. The modernity of the film, in terms of how quickly people believed in the Shaking Quakers early on, was that what they provided was a great form of therapy. It was a place where you could come and say out loud all of the things that were on your mind that you felt guilty and horrible about, be accepted for it and comforted, then dance and sing like mad for a couple hours afterwards. Honestly, I understand how that’s appealing. We’re all still searching for ways to comfort ourselves, to feel better. Right now we think we know the answers to everything because we can look it up on our phones. But there was a naivety to that period, when people were really searching for the meaning of everything, truly looking for information, for understanding and for alternatives, because they might not feel at home in the world that they were living in. It’s extraordinary to me that the Shakers had around 6,000 followers at their height, and that people would gravitate towards it. But I guess there were enough people who really wanted a place where they could feel safe and live in a different way. The Shakers were providing a belief system with the acceptance of equality for all, so I understand how that was extremely attractive at the time, as it’s extremely attractive now. I think that most people would want to live in a place where everyone is treated as equal, with generosity and love.
Testament of Ann Lee © Searchlight
BRADY CORBET
Q: What kind of stories are you and Mona interested in telling with the movies you choose to write and direct?
BRADY: Really, all of my films from The Childhood of a Leader (2015) about Woodrow Wilson and the Paris Peace Conference, to Vox Lux (2018) to The Brutalist (2024) and Mona’s last film The World to Come (2020) as well, are about the foundational stories that led us to where we are today. I think that we have an interesting perspective, because we are more or less bicontinental as a family unit. Mona is Norwegian, I was born in Arizona, in the Southwestern part of the United States; we’ve lived in a capitalist environment and in a democratic socialist environment. So we have a unique perspective. We’re fascinated by these themes, which is why we keep revisiting them from different characters’ points of view. I think that Ann Lee was America’s first feminist, and we found that pretty radical for the 18th Century, so we were excited. For context, The Shakers are responsible for the washing machine, the potato peeler, and many other household objects that we interface with on a daily basis, so they made an extraordinary imprint on this country. Even though they only grew to be roughly 6,000 at their height, their design, their philosophy, and their music is something that a lot of us, myself included before I started this project, took for granted.
Q: How did you and Mona collaborate on writing screenplays of the four films you directed, then she directed a movie that you co-wrote?
BRADY: I actually think that our relationship functions especially well when we’re working together. I understand it’s not like that for everyone, but we have different strengths, interests and perspectives, so, when we sit down to write a screenplay that Mona intends to direct, I’m writing for her, in service of her vision for the project, and vice versa. We know that it’s very difficult to serve more than one master, and that’s usually what makes projects come apart at the seams. But we know each other very well, better than most, so we really respect that the ship ultimately has one captain. We also try not micro manage our department heads, we really encourage everyone to do what they do best, and we have a lot of conversations with our collaborators. For me directing is like conducting, you’re working with an orchestra of extremely qualified pros, and you are just adjusting the volume, to some extent.
Q: You produced and financed your last two movies independently and on extremely low budgets. Is that because you wanted to protect your vision from studios interference?
BRADY: Our films are difficult to bring to market, because the marketplace only evaluates them based on the success of other projects, and that has resulted in making films pretty tedious to watch nowadays. Not all the time, of course there are exceptions to the rule, but as a cinephile, there are not as many daring experiences as there were in the 1970s from filmmakers like Ken Russell or Peter Weir or Peter Watkins. We pride ourselves in trying to push the medium a little bit further forward than we found it, we want to bring new and fresh experiences to viewers, because we don’t want to retread in the footsteps of filmmakers of a bygone era. This is all in pursuit of a new language, in the process of being in dialogue with the past. We are constantly doing our best to leave a medium that we cherish and love so much in a better place than where we found it, which is our job as cultural gatekeepers. We are mostly focused on our 11-year-old daughter (Ada) inheriting a better culture than the one that we grew up with. That’s the idea, that’s where we’re coming from, in a philosophical perspective. And some days, that’s easier than others, but we’re doing our best within the parameters of an uber-capitalist monopoly that we’re all living and working under in the United States.