Deborah Davis (screenwriter)

Deborah Davis is a British lawyer, freelance journalist and screenwriter .

Life

Davis is a trained attorney, but gave up her practice in a London financial services firm in the 1990s to raise her two children. She used her professional background to work as a freelance journalist for Screen International and Vogue , mainly concerned with film financing. During this time she made numerous connections in the film industry.

After reading an article about Queen Anne in a local evening paper , she was determined to write a screenplay about the affair between Anne and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough . Davis, who had studied history, among other things, and believed she knew everything about the kings and queens of England, was prompted by the article to do further research, including in the British Museum , where Sarah's diaries are kept. Having never written a script before, she attended an evening class at the local college in West London. She used her connections in the film industry to present the first draft of her Queen Anne screenplay Balance of Power to producer Ceci Dempsey in 1998 .

Dempsey was interested in the material, but not ready for further development, and asked Davis to keep in touch with her. Based on this first draft Davis was, after all, to study at the University of East Anglia in eastern England Norwich approved, where he made her Master of Arts in Screenwriting . During the two years of study she continued to work on her script. She was supported in the further development of Val Taylor , the then head of the course. On the side, Davis completed a correspondence course in creative writing and poetry and wrote many poems, which she did not publish. According to her own statement, this succinct form of writing helped her a lot in developing the script.

In the early 2000s, she resubmitted the screenplay Balance of Power to Ceci Dempsey. This time Dempsey accepted the script and raised BFI film funding for further development. In 2007 Dempsey won another producer, Lee Magiday , director of Element Pictures. In 2009, Balance of Power was selected for the Brit List as one of the best unproduced scripts, finishing in fifth place. In 2010 Dempsey hired the Greek avant-garde director Giorgos Lanthimos to make the film. However, it still proved difficult to find funding for a film with three female lead roles and a lesbian subtext.

In the meantime, Davis wrote other historical dramas (e.g. Heiress Presumptive ), a five-part radio play Balance of Power for BBC Radio 4 and several contemporary dramas and radio plays: Guilty Until Proven Innocent , also for BBC Radio 4, based on her script a couple whose child is taken away from them by the state; and The Other , a romantic comedy about an Arab Israeli and a British Jew. Her play Court Pastoral was selected for the 2003 International Playwriting Festival.

Davis continued to work on her screenplay for a few years with director Lanthimos, who had meanwhile won international recognition for his film Dogtooth (e.g. Oscar nomination in 2011 for the best foreign language film category); then Lanthimos brought the Australian playwright and television screenwriter Tony McNamara to further development. Lanthimos and McNamara revised the script again over several years. Some historical details were changed, and after producer Dempsey herself looked at Sarah's diaries, she initiated the renaming of The Balance of Power to The Favorite . The idea of ​​dividing it into eight chapters only came to Lanthimos when editing the film.

Filming finally began, after almost twenty years of development, in March 2017 at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. For their many years of work, Davis and McNamara also received a credit as Executive Producers . The finished film The Favorite celebrated its world premiere in August 2018 as part of the Venice Film Festival. Davis has been nominated for more than twenty film awards, including the Golden Globe Award and the Oscar, for her screenplay . At the 72nd BAFTA Awards in February 2019 , she and Tony McNamara received the award for Best Original Screenplay and, as co-producers, the award for Outstanding British Film .

Davis is currently involved in the development of television versions of her previous radio plays and is writing another play.

Web links

• Deborah Davis in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ https://deadline.com/2019/01/the-favourite-deborah-davis-tony-mcnamara-oscars-screenwriting-interview-1202520990/
2. ↑ https://awfj.org/blog/2019/02/07/deborah-davis-talks-the-favourite-rivalries-and-the-future-gill-pringle-interviews-exclusive/
3. ↑ https://www.screendaily.com/other-festivals/uk-brit-list-topped-by-george-kays-good-luck-anthony-belcher/5006384.article
4. ↑ https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/the-brit-list-2009-version-d0d201021499
5. ↑ http://www.awardsdaily.com/2018/11/05/deborah-davis-talks-to-awards-daily-about-the-favourites-twenty-year-journey-to-the-big-screen/
6. ↑ https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-the-favourite-screenplay-deborah-davis-tony-mcnamara-20181123-story.html