The Favourite

Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite won the Grand Jury Prize and the Volpi Cup for Best Actress (Olivia Colman) at the 75th Venice International Film Festival in 2018. Colman went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress at the 91st Academy Awards in February 2019, with the film earning ten Oscar nominations in total, including Best Picture, Best Director and acting nominations for Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz. It also won the BAFTA for Best Film and the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film.

The screenplay is by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara. Davis had developed the script over nearly twenty years, originally drafting it in the late 1990s; the project bounced through multiple developments and partial castings before McNamara was brought on to revise the dialogue toward Lanthimos' tonal register. The Australian writer's involvement marked the start of a long collaboration with Lanthimos that would extend through Poor Things (2023), Kinds of Kindness (2024) and Bugonia (2025).

The film was shot principally at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, the actual residence of the Cecil family, used by Lanthimos as a stand-in for Kensington Palace and Queen Anne's court. Cinematography is by Robbie Ryan, working in extreme wide-angle and natural-light conditions; many sequences were shot using only candlelight and direct daylight, an approach Ryan would extend in Poor Things. The cast pairs Colman, Weisz and Stone with Nicholas Hoult, Joe Alwyn and Mark Gatiss, with the dance sequence at the centre of the film choreographed by Constanza Macras.