Queen Anne’s bed was hand built, hand carved and painted. It was 14 feet high with four mattresses and layers of beautiful bedding. The bed is a fairly accurate queen’s bed, but we pushed the scale so that it really towered in the room. I remember there being concern about the weight of the bed and whether it would be too heavy for the wooden floor and the ceiling below. We had to do all sorts of calculations about weight distribution . . . but those floors were built to last!
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The Favourite is the latest work from Yorgos Lanthimos, the creator of Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Set in England’s royal court during the early 18th century, The Favourite takes a dark look into the life of Queen Anne, a monarch bisected by the punitive Lady Sarah Marlborough and the abating Abigail Masham. It’s an absurdist vision of court life, where pointed cruelty and misdirection nips at the Queen, incapacitating her as much as does her gout.
The film’s cinematography by Robbie Ryan employs fish-eye lenses, knee-level camera angles, and whiplash movements to unease the audience. The locations of the film also unsettle, with massive rooms that dwarf The Favourite’s trio with a mixture of opulence and emptiness. It’s clear the proceedings take place in locations built from, as Lady Sarah says, “monstrous extravagance.” The film often dances playfully with period authenticity and anachronism, swirling all its pieces together into a lush but soured cake.
The Favourite has been nominated for ten Academy Awards, including one for Fiona Crombie, the film’s production designer. Her work on The Favourite has won her the British Academy of Film and Television Award for Best Production Design and an Art Directors’ Guild Award for Excellence in Production Design. Her work has also been featured in Justin Kurzel’s The Snowtown Murders (2011) and Macbeth (2015), and Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake (2015). Here we discuss locations, scale, and rabbit cages.
You’ve previously had experience crafting spartan histories with Macbeth. Did that film prepare you for The Favourite?
Yes, Macbeth was my first “period” film, and I remember realizing at the beginning of that process that I should think of the design the way that I was taught to design for theatre – to be expressive and interpretive rather than historically accurate. We had to find creative solutions to how we told the story, and that led us to make interesting choices that we likely wouldn’t have made if we had a bigger budget. We researched the history and the period, then chose to step away from historical accuracy so that we could create an emotive, cinematic world for the film that was practical for the budget and schedule. I took a similar approach with The Favourite because of a low budget.
I read that your research for Macbeth was broad, ranging from period-specific pieces to contemporary photography. What were your reference points for The Favourite?
Buckingham House by James Stephanoff (1818)
I have the same process on each film. At the very beginning, I work closely with a visual researcher, Phil Clark, and he and I speak about the project and any initial impulses I may have. He does a sweep of imagery, and from there we refine the selection. The images are always broad. They can be documentary photography, paintings, historical reference, sculptures, architectural drawings, embroidery … anything! Through my selections, we tease out any threads that emerge. Some of The Favourite references were interior illustrations by 19th-century artist James Stephanoff that showed vast, empty spaces with minimal furnishing. William Hogarth’s paintings were looked at for servants’ quarters, and I looked at the contemporary photography by Alessandro Cirillo and Candida Hofer for tone.
How did you decide upon the Hatfield House?
The decision to work at Hatfield House came very early in the process. It was booked well in advance. I remember looking at it one year before we were due to start shooting. The house is a beautifully preserved piece of Jacobean architecture. A major factor in choosing Hatfield was that they allowed us to use candlelight and to have open flames. The majority of historical homes don’t allow candles because of the fire risk and the potential damage from wax. In many ways, using Hatfield House was essential to making the film the way we did. Yorgos Lanthimos was always keen that the film be lit by daylight or candlelight, so had we not been able to use Hatfield House, the look of the film would have been greatly compromised.
What was your process for curation in historic sites? Was it difficult to bring in new pieces, move objects, work around the public?
Hatfield House was incredibly accommodating. We just had to be very clear and organized about what we wanted removed as it was an involved process. There was no deciding at the last minute. We had to have detailed dressing plans with each item annotated so they understood what was being removed and what was going where. We had special storage units built for the artworks and furniture that were removed. Often, my prop team is responsible for moving and reinstating furniture on location but in this case, it was a special team of art handlers. There were a couple of tables that were not only incredibly old and precious, but also incredibly long. We simply couldn’t get them out of the doors, so they were dressed into the sets. Hatfield House didn’t restrict what was brought into the house (other than water – all the flowers were fake!), but at Hampton Court, we had to have our furniture from approved hire houses because there can be a risk of contaminating wood. The majority of the shoot at Hatfield House was during the “off” season, so we had the run of the house. Hampton Court was a different story. We dressed and filmed while the building was open to the public. Dressing sets behind a rope cordon while the public snapped photos was a novel experience.
Were the sequences set on the grounds also filmed at Hatfield House? Did you need to alter much of their appearance?
We filmed the exterior palace scenes at Hatfield House. We did add greens dressing, mainly topiary, into the gardens to accentuate the sculpted look. There is a considerable amount of VFX set extension in those scenes, too. Hatfield House is much smaller than the palace in our story, so Yorgos and I spent some time designing a believable, asymmetrical palace extension that amalgamated the details of St. James Palace, Hampton Court, and Hatfield House. The palace that is in the film is roughly four times the size of Hatfield House.
How was staging in the Hampton Court kitchens?
At Hatfield House, we had construction in almost every room. All of our building and painting was done off-site but we were able to modify the rooms (under the watchful eyes of the household staff), provided we were extremely careful. At Hampton Court, we couldn’t touch the walls. I wanted to lean a broom up against a wall, but that wasn’t allowed. Of course, I understand why. If everyone had put something against those walls for the last 250 years, they would be irreparably damaged. Our construction elements had to be carefully sleeved into position with millimeters on either side. The logistics of having food in the kitchens was also complicated. We couldn’t have anything that may stain surfaces, like strawberries or beetroot, or be airborne and settle in crevices, like flour. All original surfaces had to be covered. Working in Hampton Court was complicated, but well worth it. The scale of the building is extraordinary.
Could you tell me a little about the spa location?
We built the spa set at a location called Danson House. We chose the location for the shape of the room, particularly the ceiling, but we had to do substantial alterations. The room is actually a fairly decrepit Victorian kitchen. We clad all the walls and cabinetry with marbled sheeting, and we built the platform that the bath was sitting on. The spa was one of only two sets in the film that wasn’t 360 degrees. Just out of shot was an enormous Victorian stove.
Spa concept
Oftentimes, the sets dwarf the characters, who are isolated in the grandeur. It’s such wonderful storytelling through design. I’d like to know how you approached scale, in this way.
My first impulse when reading the script was that there should be a play on scale. In my early meetings with Yorgos, I showed him illustrations of vast spaces with only a few objects. Some of the illustrations had oversized beds or thrones. There was extraordinary grandeur, but also sparseness and emptiness. It just felt right that the rooms should dwarf the characters. I never wanted the palace to feel cozy or plush. We chose not to have any floor coverings for that reason, too. I liked the hard gleam off the wooden floors.
Anne’s bedroom concept
The camera stalks around The Favourite, spinning on its axis in wide shots, taking in entire locations, from floor to ceiling. Did this kind of 360-degree coverage make you nervous or change your approach?
One of Yorgos’s main notes for me from the beginning of prep was to have movement in the rooms and hallways. We needed to create “corridors” in each room so that Robbie Ryan, the film’s DP, had the freedom to move the camera around. It wasn’t a concern, because we knew we wanted to keep the rooms lightly furnished anyway. I like empty space in sets. I think it can give clarity for the audience. They can really see what is there as opposed to when there is too much in a frame. What did come as a surprise was that the fish-eye lenses took in so much of the floors and ceilings at the same time. I never wanted the visuals to be overwhelming, so some of our work was about simplifying what was in the frame. For example, the interior wall in the Great Hall is butter yellow with three out-of-period and immovable artworks. As a lot of the camera angles were low, I felt that it would be really distracting to have that wall in all the Great Hall scenes, so we covered it in a 16-meter-long canvas that was painted to look like trompe l’oeil wood paneling. It effectively rendered the wall invisible and simplified the space. Had we not been using such extreme lenses, we may not have worried about it, but it was worth doing. The eye is drawn to the action, rather than to a butter yellow wall!
The film’s characters are constantly walking, from room to passageway, down corridors and firelit paths. Was this movement a challenge, from a design perspective?
The greatest challenge was in finding enough corridors to tell the story. The architecture of the period didn’t really marry with the way the script was written. I think we all had visions of long, labyrinthine corridors, but in reality, they tended to be wide galleries. We used the corridors and stairs at Hatfield House and the Cartoon Gallery at Hampton Court. The secret passageway between the bedrooms was a set build in a warehouse. Lighting the walking scenes at night was complicated. We had to have candelabra on every surface. The gaffer created a candle rig that trolleyed in front of the actors so there was some front lighting, while the actors were dipping in and out of pools of light.
A lot of the film’s details and props pop and stick in one’s mind. The rabbit cages, the wall of books, the diamond-tiled floor, Queen Anne’s bed. . . . Could you tell me about these pieces?
We had fun with the rabbit cages. We drew inspiration from bird cages rather than from rabbit hutches. There are specifications about how many rabbits can be in a cage and how much individual space they need, so we made the cages double height so they didn’t take up too much floor space. We wanted them to be moved around the room and not be cumbersome. The cages were decorated with tiny terrines filled with wheatgrass, little carrots, and micro-herbs. The Queen had a table for the rabbits with small brushes and silver water bowls. We thought of the rabbit cages like dollhouses. The floor of the cages were miniature versions of the diamond floor in the gold corridor.
Queen Anne’s bed was hand built, hand carved and painted. It was 14 feet high with four mattresses and layers of beautiful bedding. The bed is a fairly accurate queen’s bed, but we pushed the scale so that it really towered in the room. I remember there being concern about the weight of the bed and whether it would be too heavy for the wooden floor and the ceiling below. We had to do all sorts of calculations about weight distribution . . . but those floors were built to last!
The majority of the books in the library belong to Hatfield House, excluding those that Sarah hurled at Abigail. We actually built over sections of the library in order to make the room into a believable bedroom.
When we started working at Hatfield House and Hampton Court, we created an asset list of what worked for the aesthetic of our film and what didn’t, and then chose to accentuate the elements that did and remove or disguise those that didn’t. For example, we replicated the Hatfield House wood paneling in the walls we built in Sarah’s bedroom and the secret passage. We replicated the whitewash finish of Hampton Court in the wall finish in Abigail’s bedroom. We added to the tapestries that were in the Queen’s bedroom so that the entire room was covered. We also added black-and-white tiles to the cartoon gallery so they were through every set in the royal court. We took advantage of our locations as much as possible and brought them into our story. This was both a creative choice and an economic one. With a tight budget, it was better to enhance what existed rather than start from scratch. The black-and-white tiles inspired the monochromatic costume and makeup designs too.
Thank you for speaking with us, Fiona.
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All images are courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures.
