The Favourite is a period film that has no real date. It loosely takes place during the early 18th century reign of England’s Queen Anne, a time of war, scientific innovation, and the development of a two-party parliamentary system. But Yorgos Lanthimos’ vision trades in traditional accuracy for mesmerising whimsy — and really, who needs history when you’ve got Joe Alwyn ’s dance moves?
The result is a visual feast that takes its cues from Alice in Wonderland: You’ve got an emotionally unstable, lonely queen (Olivia Colman), two viciously smart women vying her affections and attention (Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz), and a whole lot of wonderfully weird animals doing fanciful things in the middle of a palace. Courtiers in towering wigs battle boredom by throwing oranges at a naked man, while in the royal suite above, Anne stuffs her mouth with bright blue birthday cake.
It’s decadent and weird, and someone had to bring it all to life. Enter Fiona Crombie, who, along with set designer Alice Felton, is nominated for an Oscar in Production Design, one of The Favourite ’s 10 overall nods from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. On Sunday, she took home a BAFTA for her work on the film, and she deserves it!
The Favourite presents a particular challenge for a production designer, responsible for creating a look that represents the real aesthetic of the time, while allowing for the debauched, luxurious innovations and quirks specific to the film. (For example, wheelchairs like the one Queen Anne uses wouldn’t have existed then — it had to be imagined from scratch to meld seamlessly with the rest of the decor.)
Crombie met Lanthimos in 2012, and was sent a version of the script three years later, in 2015. In other words, she’s been thinking about her vision for the wild world of Queen Anne’s court for quite some time, down to the most minute details. With only £1.3 million for her budget, Crombie’s job description included everything from designing the piles of beautiful cookies that adorn handcrafted side tables, to creating spaces for the film’s most unsung heroes: Queen Anne’s 17 pet rabbits, and her courtiers’ team of competitive duck athletes. And because of Lanthimos’ use of wide angle lenses, there was no room for error.
Read on for a crash course in turning a state room into a race track for stylish water fowl, the secret to caring for royal pets, and why scale is Crombie’s secret weapon.
Picking The Palace
The Favourite was filmed at Hatfield House, a Jacobean manor built in 1611 by Robert Cecil, advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. It’s a location that’s been the backdrop for many films over the years, including Tomb Raider (2001), Sherlock Holmes (2009), and All The Money In The World (2017).
But while most productions only used Hatfield for a single scene, or as part of a larger whole, Crombie and her colleagues set up shop there for weeks on end.
“We had the time to reinvent it,” Crombie told Refinery29 in a phone interview. “Just kind of play with the bones of the building and bring it into our story.”
That means that we see the same rooms over and over again, in different contexts and at various points throughout the film. And that’s where small details become important.
Take the queen’s bedroom, for example. Crombie and her team made sure that the accessories and knick knacks that littered the tables were subtly different depending on who was in favor, Sarah (Weisz) or Abigail (Stone).
“We did this whole narrative with the flowers, and the palette of the flowers, and the food throughout all the scenes,” she said. “There’s lots of sugar, and cakes and things when Abigail is taking care of the queen. So, it’s like she’s giving her what she wants. Whereas when Sarah is taking care of the queen, she’s much more in control. So, it’s like dried fruits and nuts and things like that.”
“It was something that was so specific to the film, because we return to a lot of the spaces,” Crombie added. “We were able to really layer those details in. Sometimes you make sets and you’re in there for a couple of days and you don’t get to change the space, and there was something really fun for us about constantly morphing spaces. Multiple scenes happen in the same room, but they take on a different tonality depending on the mood of the court but also, how the queen is feeling. Her room is sometimes really messy because she’s in a bad way, other times it’s really tidy because she’s on top of things or she’s having a meeting. Sometimes she wants to have a lobster race — there’s all these kinds of movement in the spaces.”
Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Okay, But What About The Ducks?
The screenplay for The Favourite describes the duck race scene thusly:
“Gentlemen! Ducks! We see a makeshift ring has been fashioned out of chairs and upturned tables. Godolphin holds a duck, he lets it go at the same time a tory next to him does the same. Money is thrust to a CENTRAL BOOKIE (Tory) who holds bets. The ducks race to cheers.”
It’s a fleeting moment that has almost nothing to do with the plot, except to add to the overall vibe of aristocratic abundance and absurdity. Of course Prime Minister Godolphin (James Smith) spends his days racing his prize duck Horatio in the midst of a war with France and potential tax riots — what else is he supposed to do?
That’s the mindset that Crombie had to enter in order to make those kinds of forays into the surreal believable.
“It’s kind of like they’re in this playground, and maybe they’re a bit bored so they’re like ‘Oh, what should we do next? Let’s have a duck race,’” she said. “So, we had to think about how would you improvise that? How would you improvise a circuit?”
Crombie decided to bring in benches that had been used for another scene, and place them in a circle as a little circuit for the ducks to run around in.
“It’s actually really fun mental work, to step inside,” she said. “The thing that’s so great about Yorgos’ films is that he always has an internal language that you believe. The audience steps into his world, and they have their own rules that we just accept. In The Lobster you can be turned into an animal. In this court, these are the games, these are the rules, this is the behavior. We just kind of stepped into trying to think that way on a whole lot of levels.”
One of those levels even involved creating a custom leash for Horatio to stroll around with. Unfortunately, it was rarely used.
“Honestly we all forgot that the duck would quack,” she said. “The first scene that Horatio was in where there was dialogue, the minute that [James Smith] started speaking, Horatio started to quack. And we all looked at each other like, ‘what do we do now? ‘How can you tell a duck not to quack?’”
As it turns out Horatio (who Crombie actually believes to be a lady duck) liked to be held. “She was meant to be walking around on a leash, but whenever that happened she liked to quack.” An icon.
Photo: Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Down The Rabbit Hole We Go
A key point in The Favourite ’s plot is that Queen Anne has a thing for rabbits. They represent her 17 dead children, and she expects any woman who curries favor with her to nurture them as she would.
Once again, Crombie had to think outside the box, asking herself: “How would a queen treat her rabbits? What are the things that would be on a table for the rabbits?”
A rabbit hutch like the one Crombie designed would not have existed in 18th century England. But the script called for “a fenced off hay-filled pen that contains 17 white rabbits,” and so she had to improvise.
“Rabbits get really unhappy if they’re too close to each other,” she said. “We worked out exactly how much space each rabbit needed and then we designed the cages to accommodate that.”
But these are no ordinary rabbits. They are regal pets — substitutes for princes and princesses — and need to be appropriately pampered.
“We had this table, and it had micro-herbs and tiny little carrots and little petals, and things that [Queen Anne] would feed the rabbits,” Crombie explained. “We had miniature brushes, and tiny little silver jugs to fill up the tiny little silver bowl — we made them like doll-sized. Everything for the rabbits was absolutely exquisite. They were totally royal rabbits!”
Photo: Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures.
“Drink Me.”/ “Eat Me.”
If you’ve seen the film, you may have noticed that there’s a play on scale that contributes to the overall sense of a world that’s off-kilter — like Alice, through the looking glass.
A good example of this is Abigail’s humble servant’s quarters. The space was already small, but Crombie made it look even smaller by playing with proportions. Emma Stone’s body appears to fill the entire space, mostly because the items around her are tiny — and sparse. This is someone who arrives with few possessions, and over the course of the film, proceeds to claw her way up the social ladder.
“ The ceiling is really low, the door, and then all her pieces in it are also small,” Crombie said. “And through her climb in the royal court, she slowly accumulates. I love the idea that quietly she’s making herself at home. At the start it’s completely empty, she’s got no bedding. By the time she’s married, she’s got a beautiful blanket. She’s basically collected bits and pieces as she’s managed to work her way up”
That same idea applies to grander spaces like Sarah’s library room, or the Queen’s chambers, which features a gigantic canopied bed that dwarfs the woman who occupies it.
“I loved the idea of human scale in this enormous place, and what that does to a person who is so lonely,” Crombie said. “It doesn’t matter how lavish, you’re still lonely. There’s a hardness to those wooden floors and the gleaming furniture, bouncing light. It’s not soft. Except for in [Anne’s] bed — that’s pretty soft.”
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