Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet on The Testament of Ann Lee, That Brutalist AI Controversy and Whats Next

Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold have been here before — quite recently, in fact. The partners in life and work are back in Los Angeles for another cycle of hybrid awards-release promotion, merely a year after their film The Brutalist made the same rounds — eventually going home with three Oscars in addition to a nomination for best picture. They wrote that midcentury epic together, with Corbet directing. Their Hollywood encore tour is in honor of another epic co-writing project, The Testament of Ann Lee, this time directed by Fastvold.

“This process of campaigning a movie is kind of a full-time job and so you end up neglecting every other aspect of your job and life,” says Corbet from a hotel restaurant patio, sitting between me and Fastvold. “I basically have spent March until now trying to play catch up, and now it’s starting again. We’re obviously really grateful to have the problem, but it’s trying to figure out how to balance it all.”

Fastvold adds that she didn’t expect to be here at all this year. Like The Brutalist, The Testament of Ann Lee was written, cast, financed and filmed without a distributor signing on — and then swiftly generated interest for an eleventh-hour awards run once it premiered to great fanfare in Venice. The film generated strong reviews for Fastvold’s bold filmmaking, and particular awards buzz for Amanda Seyfried’s gonzo performance as the eponymous leader of the Shakers religious sect. Now Searchlight Pictures has a Christmas Day theatrical release set, gearing up for a range of special 70mm screenings just as A24 mounted last year for The Brutalist.

Oh, and did we mention The Testament of Ann Lee is a musical? Indeed, Fastvold and Corbet kept their Oscar-winning Brutalist composer Daniel Blumberg busy with this one.

If it’s safe to say you’ve never seen a movie like Ann Lee, there’s one basic reason for that: No one is making movies like Corbet and Fastvold right now. These are huge scale productions completed for under $10 million, completely independent and outwardly audacious. They elicit raves, controversy, and endless discourse. They have already written another script, with Corbet set to direct it, and sense things maybe, hopefully getting slightly easier for them, in terms of pooling enough resources together. In their first joint conversation of the season, they get into all of that and more.

You’re making these incredibly ambitious movies for such low budgets, and it’s something you both talk a lot about — the very complicated paths to being able to realize a vision like Ann Lee. How do you think about that on the other side, as you bring it out into the world?

BRADY CORBET It’s obviously become a hot topic for a variety of reasons, just because of how many films are struggling at the box office. Just for clarity’s sake, we would never put a price on something which is priceless culturally. Famously expensive projects like Heaven’s Gate or The Lovers on the Bridge are movies that I think are absolutely worth it. But we are trying to create as sustainable an ecosystem as we can for ourselves and others because we want to make sure that we’re still able to make these very unique objects. We try to do it as responsibly as we can.

We would like these processes, moving forward, to be a little bit less stressful. We would love to have a little bit more wiggle room because we’ve been operating without a safety net for so many years and it’s taken a toll physically and mentally. I’m getting older and I’m not sure that I could go at the same pace I’ve gone the last decade. … Hopefully on the next film we’ll have a little bit more to work with. I also just want to make it clear that we’re not complaining because having $9 or $10 million to make a movie — it’s a lot of money. If you told us a decade ago that we would have that much money to make these films, we would’ve been frankly gobsmacked. All of these things are relative. Just like the price of a cup of coffee is now $7, movies are more expensive than they were 10 years ago too. Inflation alone will make my next movie a more expensive movie than The Brutalist, even though in many ways in terms of scale and scope, they’re very similar.

What was it like putting the financing together for Ann Lee? Were you trying to package it differently than The Brutalist?

MONA FASTVOLD It still feels like a miracle to me that this one got made. I mean, The Brutalist too, but this one — I can’t believe I got to make this film. Any creative partners who read the script in the early stages came on board immediately: “Yeah, great, let’s do it.” But in terms of studios and distributors, everyone was just like, “No.”

I mean, we tried to sell The Brutalist. We just try to make the movies and we’re not always just like, “Yes, let’s let it be 100 percent independent.” We were exploring all options. If we found a great partner, then maybe that would be right for it. But because we managed to climb this hill with Ann Lee, which felt just impossible, we’re now feeling like there’s just no way we’d compromise the beauty of this independence and the peace we had in making it.

CORBET The thing that we’re very grateful for and as it relates to the success of the last movie is it basically just gave us some job security for the first time in our lives. You have a pretty strong sense of how far you can push the ambition and still remain within the boundaries of something that we feel confident we can secure financing for. We don’t know what kind of compromises we’ll have to make along the way, but all I know is that we will be making a movie next year. Normally we’ve been like, “We feel confident that we’re making a movie sometime in the next five to 10 years.” Now it’s as long as we have the material ready — and we’ll see how long that lasts because the movies are radical. They’re not going to work for everybody all the time, and that’s okay. I’m not interested in playing it safe.

There’s been a lot of speculation about your next movie already. What can you share and maybe what would you like to clarify about it?

CORBET Well, all I can say about the new film is that there’s been a lot of misinformation. It’s true that the film is an X-rated movie, and it’s true that it takes place mostly in the 1970s, but the film spans from the 19th century into the present day — it’s just predominantly focused on the ’70s. The film is really, really genre-defying. But it was reported that the movie has something to do with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which is not true at all. That is just inaccurate. I think that the reason that was misconstrued is that I was talking about making a film that’s set in the 1970s. It will owe a debt to films of the period, but it’s not a slasher film. I’d love to make one, one day, but this one’s not.

FASTVOLD So they thought you were remaking it or something?

CORBET I just keep getting asked about it in interviews. They’re like, “I heard it’s inspired by Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” I’m like, “It’s about Northern California’s economy.” (Laughs.) But yeah, as of right now, I am doing camera tests for it all day tomorrow. It’s our third round of tests. We are shooting on really, really rarefied formats that have usually shot shots in movies, but not entire movies before.

And the movie will be entirely shot on 70mm, which we’re really thrilled about. The plan is to work a lot with eight perforation and 15 perforation, which is exciting because it’s not an action movie. I love big spectacle, technical releases, so it’s interesting to have a film that is absolutely not that, that’s still shot with that same tech. We’re supposed to start next summer, but there’s nine months between now and then, so anything could happen, but we start prep next month. It’s territory that’s totally uncharted for us, which is always nerve-wracking and exciting in equal measure.

I feel like this is always the case with you two. You have to be wondering going into Venice with a Brutalist or an Ann Lee, “How is this going to play?” They’re enormous swings.

FASTVOLD You have to feel scared. If not, then you’re not doing it right. That’s how I feel. You have to have an element of, “This is dangerous. I’m trying something where I could really fall on my face if I step to the left or to the right too far.” You have to try and push yourself and push those boundaries.

CORBET If we sit down and anyone is able to distill what we’ve done down to two or three comps — “It’s X meets Y” — then we are really disappointed. That’s not the goal. It’s actually the reason that it was worth clearing up about the Texas Chain Saw. We try to listen to the characters, let the themes tell us what it wants to be as opposed to trying to back into something that’s going to be more accessible for readers. We don’t think about genre. We’ve never thought about genre. It became clear to us in the [Ann Lee] writing process, they were a musical people. They worshiped through song and dance. We were like, “Let’s do a musical.”

Mona, I remember when we spoke right before the premiere, you asked me if I thought it was a musical. Even you weren’t sure.

FASTVOLD I was like, “What do you think?” It was such an exploratory process throughout the whole period of making the film that I was still sort of like, “Is that really where it’s landed?”

And you’ve decided it is a musical.

FASTVOLD We decided, we decided. (Laughs.) We had worked so closely together with the sound design and the composition of the songs and the score, I don’t know where the sound design starts and the music begins — we did all this moving them in and out of each other.

CORBET When we’re writing something, we’re writing for each other, meaning that I always knew that this was Mona’s film, and I obviously know her very well. One of her extraordinary strengths is movement. She has a background in choreography and performance art. She went to a school for performing arts in Denmark, and it’s a really unique skillset. It’s not one that I have, so it was an exciting thing to watch her flex that muscle, which is something I’ve just privately known for years.

FASTVOLD I desperately wanted to make this film and it was a sum of all the things I’m excited by in one place — but I also understood that this was not necessarily something that everyone else was going to jump to on paper. I didn’t know how it was going to play. I knew some people would find their way to it and would be interested in it, but definitely didn’t feel like, well —

You didn’t expect Disney to buy it.

FASTVOLD Yeah, I certainly did not. (Laughs.) But you did, Brady.

CORBET I did, which is very funny. Mona is so empathetic and her empathy for these characters is something that I feel deeply in the movie. The movie’s quite sweet. I mean, even though the film, of course, has sequences that are brutal, and it’s a very unusual musical, in many ways it’s also a very classical movie, one of the more classical movies we’ve done in structure. So I was like, “Guys, full disclosure, it’s kind of a really strange Disney movie.” I was shooting a lot of second-unit, and I was like, “I’m really feeling it!”

A lot of the Shaker hymns are just total bangers. They really are. They’re fun. So that coupled with Daniel’s original score — I mean, the songs didn’t start off sounding like that.

What’s your process together like, writing on a movie like Ann Lee?

FASTVOLD The person who is going to direct the film really does a lot more of the research early on. This one was such an insanely long process. So I was doing a ton of research on the Shakers and Ann, and I then brought that to Brady. We sat down together and then we obsessively wrote day and night for six to eight weeks on our first draft. Then after that we spend however long it takes to make the film until it’s actually done and delivered.

CORBET Every project is a response to what you just did. There’s no way for it not to be. After we made Childhood [of a Leader], I was like, alright, we have been in the realm of good taste for a few years working in the early 20th century, so now let’s do 2001. You’ve been in one universe for so many years that when you’re done with the movie, you want to do the opposite. It also depends on what’s going on in your life. Are you feeling empathetic? Are you feeling cynical? Are you responding to the times we’re living in?

One day I would genuinely love to make a movie for kids. But I don’t know, the next one’s not a movie for kids at all. No. Well, maybe some kids. It would’ve been a movie for me when I was a kid.

FASTVOLD But you were very special. He tried to show Texas Chain Saw Massacre to [our 11-year-old daughter] Ada last year for Halloween, and I was like, what is wrong with you? (Laughs.)

CORBET There’s not that much on-screen violence! We had very different childhoods, Mona.

FASTVOLD I lived in a tree and baked cookies.

CORBET And I definitely was watching pretty hardcore horror movies when I was nine or 10. We didn’t realize how good we had it in the nineties, did we? There were dozens and dozens of extraordinary films. I think that there’s so much stuff now — just the volume of it, it’s going to get a lot worse with AI because now they’re just going to churn. It’s going to explode, churn out the sludge. But the analog processes and artisanal processes are going to be of more and more value now. It’s an interesting moment because record stores are booming, and actually for the first time in my life, I don’t have to fight as hard as I used to, to shoot on celluloid. 10 years ago I was really, really worried about the format going away. I freaked out when Fuji went out of business. I used to only shoot on Fuji stock.

FASTVOLD We came to Searchlight with Ann Lee and they’re like, “Okay, let’s start making the prints!” I thought maybe, “Oh, are you going to make one or two?” But they’re making a ton of prints. People want to come and see it in 70mm and 35mm, so they really are making a ton for the whole world. It’s great.

You mentioned AI. In the spirit of clarifying things, that topic spun a little out of control in headlines and on social media as it pertained to the way it was used in The Brutalist.

FASTVOLD I know — it’s hard because, even if we say anything about it now, it’s just going to be like…what’s pulled out. Not even any articles that were written about it were necessarily wrong. It’s just the headline was weird —

CORBET No, actually, a lot of them were wrong.

FASTVOLD Some were wrong,

CORBET A lot of them were wrong. Sorry — they actually were wrong. The problem is that you can’t be in a situation where the lady doth protest too much. If you get really granular and you walk people through it, you’re just digging a deeper and deeper grave because it’s such a sensitive topic. I understand why it’s sensitive, but the thing is, for example, in all grading softwares that every movie is graded on, there’s AI in the software.

FASTVOLD And almost all VFX companies also use AI plugins. I just want to learn as much as I possibly can about it and really understand all the tools available to us — and that goes for tools from the past and future. On Ann Lee, we’re using hand-painted matte paintings and glass [set] extensions, which is a very old technique that’s almost completely died out. I want to engage with it all. It’s really important to engage with it and educate ourselves. Again, we never corrected the actors’ accents in English or their performances[on The Brutalist], but we did help them sound Hungarian when they were speaking Hungarian. We wanted to represent the Hungarian people accurately and not offend them by having someone doing a poor imitation of their language.

CORBET The performers delivered all of the Hungarian dialogue parts of the process. We manually stitched it together with dialogue editing, and then we used AI tools to fix certain consonants and vowels to make it more fluid. That’s all we did, and I would’ve done it again because it was the right tool for the job. I don’t care if a tool is from 1950 or 2050, I want the right tool for the job.

I’m no stranger to controversy and I speak my mind and people agree or disagree and that’s okay. But I was disappointed that my actors who worked so hard for so many years…just became the headline. I was happy to talk about it, but it just kept snowballing and snowballing and at a certain point I realized that nobody knows what they don’t know. In order for me to really walk people through this, it required a level of familiarity with these processes that very, very few people have.

The last thing, to speak of this summarily, is that what was particularly hilarious about it for us is that we don’t know many folks that have a more analog workflow than we do. It’s fine that there’s a misunderstanding, but we actually spend a lot of time and effort and struggle to refurbish cameras that were basically like paperweights of Panavision until two years ago. The same thing on the new movie. Mona’s film, however, used zero AI.

FASTVOLD It was not required for this one. This one was the most analog experience you could ever have. So there you go.