Playing favourites: Rachel Weisz on working with Yorgos Lanthimos

Rachel Weisz has found consistency is the key to good collaboration.

Rachel Weisz in a scene from The Favourite.

Rachel Weisz knows the deal. Some things don’t happen when you make a movie with Yorgos Lanthimos. “No discussion about character, motivation, story, intention, psychology. No analysis. Nothing like that,” she says.

The Favourite is the second movie she has made with him and she’s hoping for many more. “I would love to keep collaborating with him until I’m an old lady.”

The Favourite is a period drama — set in the English court in the early 18th century, in the reign of Queen Anne — that takes exquisite, gleeful, startling liberties with tone, narrative and historical detail. Its focus is on three women: the ailing, fretful, easily manipulated queen (Olivia Colman); Lady Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Weisz), her oldest, closest friend; and Lady Sarah’s cousin, the ­ambitious Abigail Hill (Emma Stone).

This is Lanthimos’s third English-language feature, but it’s a departure from the offbeat melancholy dystopia of The Lobster and deadpan dread of The Killing of a Sacred Deer. It’s a film about desires, sexual and emotional needs, and how they affect the exercise of power. It’s ferocious, witty, profane and unexpectedly poignant, and there are three wonderful performances at its heart.

The Favourite’s director Yorgos Lanthimos. Picture: Emma Stone

In other circumstances, in other films, Weisz would be ready for discussion, intention, analysis. And she was free to immerse herself in period detail, she says. Lanthimos “wouldn’t have minded if I’d gone and done two years of ­research if that’s what I wanted to do. He just wouldn’t have been interested in me then saying, ‘Hold on a minute, Lady Sarah wouldn’t have done that because history book No 378 that I read said she did it like this.’

“No one really knows what people said to each other behind closed doors, so it’s all up for imagining. And we’re inside his imagination, and it’s particularly bold, powerful and unusual. It’s such a wonderful place to be.”

The script was brought to Lanthimos after the success of his 2009 feature Dogtooth. He was intrigued by the idea of The Favourite.

“But I knew I would have to work on it to make it my own, and have a reason to be making a British period film that wasn’t your typical period film,” Lanthimos says. “I worked a little bit with the original screenwriter, Deborah [Davis] to create a structure.

“I then felt we needed to bring on a writer with a different voice to get to where I had in mind, so we read a lot of material from hundreds of writers around the world and ended up finding this Australian writer,” which is his way of introducing Tony McNamara (whose credits include Doctor Doctor, Puberty Blues, Tangle and The Rage in Placid Lake, which he also ­directed).

“Our sensibilities seemed to match,” McNamara says. He worked for several years with Lanthimos on the screenplay. “We would work, do a pass, get on Skype and do notes, and occasionally I would come to London and we would have a lot of lunches and walk around and talk and then do another pass, and then he would go off and make another movie.”

The emphasis was always on the central relationships. “Yorgos said, ‘If people are coming to this movie for history, they’re coming to the wrong movie.’ We didn’t want to do a period film where we explained English politics or wars, we wanted to focus on the complicated nature of these women and their story.”

There’s a vivid sense, nevertheless, of the ­absurd rituals and formalities of public life — everything from parliamentary sessions to duck-racing to a kind of naked dodge ball with pomegranates. We also see the way that Sarah uses her intimacy with the queen — emotional and sexual — as a way to exercise extraordinary political and economic power. There are some things Sarah does not realise about this relationship, however, until it is too late. Anne turns her attention to Abigail, who has moved from scullery maid to a job in the queen’s bedchamber; she’s exactly where she wants to be, and she knows how to make the most of it.

Weisz and Colman had worked with Lanthimos on The Lobster and knew his approach. For the actors, it began with a rehearsal period that incorporated a lot of physical exercises, games and workshops, and a sense of play and experiment carried over on to the set.

On the set of The Favourite with Rachel Weisz, Olivia Colman and director Yorgos Lanthimos.

The script doesn’t change, the delivery does — that’s where play and experiment come in.

“The lines are the lines,” Weisz says. “He liked it to be various, spontaneous and unlaboured and undeclamatory. He doesn’t like you to overact, so say it in a very simple way. He doesn’t really describe it and say ‘This is how I want you to do it’, it just ends up being like that once you’re on his set.

“I can’t really explain why or how, he never says do it like this or that, it just happens. It’s quite an extraordinary process. It’s like you get on to a wavelength, basically.

“Every scene is quite elusive and particular, and it’s not something I was in charge of or would know how to re-create. You’re right on the edge of your instincts, so it’s a beautiful journey to be on. It’s quite meticulous direction that gets it there. It’s honing and honing of us by him, and you arrive somewhere and you don’t even know where it is.”

In fact, she says, when she saw the final film she was utterly taken aback. “I wouldn’t have been able to imagine anything like it. Normally you have a sense of what you’ve done. But Yorgos is surprising, it’s just not like anything else.”

When Weisz is asked what she thought would be useful to ask Lanthimos about that ­indescribable process, immediately she comes back with a suggestion.

Ask him, she says, “How does he know when he’s got what he’s looking for?” When this question is put to ­Lanthimos, he laughs.

“I don’t. I mostly know what I don’t want, so when there’s a lot of that I feel very depressed. And then there’s stuff that feels right, but it’s not necessarily what I’m looking for.

“The truth is that in every part of the process you mould the film and change it and you don’t really know what you’re going to get in the end, and what’s going to be the best version.

“Writing is one thing, filming is another, editing comes along as well. I kind of know what I want, I basically know what I don’t want, and that helps me.

“I try to explain my process as much as possible early on. I ­always want the actor to have seen at least one or two of the works. I’m fortunate enough to have made a few films by now, so that there’s a base there, that you have ­explained the way you work and the actor has seen a sample of your work, and you start from common ground.”

Much of The Favourite is filmed in Hatfield House, a handsome 17th-century mansion and gardens. Lanthimos likes to work in genuine ­locations: “It informs how we do things and ­inspires what we do in different ways.”

In a film that takes factual liberties, he enjoys the impact of juxtaposition and contradiction that a historical setting provides.

This sense of contradiction also applies to the costumes, designed by Sandy Powell, which had period silhouettes but often were made out of contemporary materials such as denim and plastic, with 3-D printed accessories.

“All this helps you accept this as a world that has its own rules and language. Speech, texture, the fact they dance in a certain way that doesn’t necessarily feel period: physicality in general, the way they walk, stand or sit,” he says.

It was the same with the music. Lanthimos continues: “Sometimes it’s very loyal to the period, sometimes it’s contemporary. I think that mixture of elements keeps it grounded but at the same time gives it its own identity.”

When it came to working with cinematographer Robbie Ryan, there was also a sense of contrast: natural light, as much as possible, but also the stylised use of fish-eye lenses and whip-pans, Lanthimos says.

“I had an idea from the beginning. It’s something I’ve been exploring but I knew I was going to be pushing it further.

“As we started filming, with the even more extreme wide-angle lenses, we found ourselves using them more and more, it felt right.”

Lanthimos could combine intimacy and distance, space and isolation: “The fact that you have these lone figures in these huge, distorted spaces, the fact that although you show a lot of space it feels claustrophobic, the juxtaposition of wide angle and close-ups, the shock of that.

“It represented a lot of the themes of the film, ­reflected a lot of relationships and situations in a visual way.”

The Favourite opens on Boxing Day.