Vince Haycock On Filming Florence's Odyssey

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It's been more than two years in the making, but this week saw the online premiere of Florence + The Machine's The Odyssey, an ambitious 47-minute film inspired by singer Florence Welch’s personal journey to find herself again after the emotional storm of a heartbreak.

Directed by Welch's long-term collaborator, Park Pictures' Vincent Haycock and featuring choreography by Ryan Heffington, The Odyssey unites visual film segments created for the album How Big How Blue How Beautiful - including music videos What Kind Of Man, St. Jude, Ship To Wreck, Queen Of Peace and Delilah, which were released as seven individual 'chapters' over the course of 2015 and 2016. 

Ahead of the film's US theatrical premiere, Haycock tells shots about the genesis of the film, finding inspiration in biblical paintings and why this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  

What was the genesis for the film?

I first met Florence on Calvin Harris' Sweet Nothing shoot, and then she asked me to pitch on the video for Lover to Lover. On that shoot, she was so in touch with her feelings, because she was going through the relationship break-up that inspired The Odyssey and had been so beaten down by the tour. The first scene she was in tears, because she was so emotionally unstable from lack of sleep, and stress, and relationship issues. Ben, who is one of the most charismatic actors I’ve ever worked with, brought out a different side to her and she left the set feeling really happy because the process was so healing for her.  So in a way, the genesis for The Odyssey was probably Florence discovering what she wanted to do next through the [Lover to Lover] video.

I didn’t hear from her for about a year. And then all of a sudden, I got a message saying Florence was in town with some demos and wanted to meet with me. We listened to the demos over dinner at the Chateau Marmont, and it turned out they were all about LA and her real life. So we started thinking, why don’t we make a fantasy about her real life? My dream has always been to film an entire album for someone, like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which connected songs in a linear way through one character or one story. I said, ‘Why don’t we do your version of Pink Floyd and The Wall?’ And she said ‘Yeah, that’d be cool – let me talk to my managers.’ We left it like that thinking, it’s never going to happen. But here we are!

How long were you working on the film and what sort of time-frame were the videos shot on?

The entire process has been around two and a half years. The videos were spread out over a really long time - we shot one every few months and released them as 'chapters' of The Odyssey, starting with What Kind Of Man. The final chapter [for the track Third Eye] was only shot about a month ago.

How did you choose the tracks that would feature in the film?

It was a combination of business and pleasure. When a label plans an album, they’ll pick the three tracks that are going to get people excited about the album and release them as singles - the big banger anthems like What Kind Of Man, followed up with a second track that complements that but is a little different, and so on. So it was a combo of that and of us asking which songs we’d want for the film. For instance St Jude was an amazing song but the label wasn’t going to make that a single – so we thought, what if we just kick in a little more money and shoot St Jude off the back of What Kind Of Man? It ended up being my favourite video.

How did you bring a flow and narrative to the seven distinct segments?

It was surprisingly intuitive and easy and at the same time quite lucky. There were a lot of obstacles – we lost the main actor, Morgan Watkins, who we wanted to cast for the entire film when he booked a big feature and could no longer do any of the videos. So we had to re-think that. We had to develop [the narrative] as we went along, but always kept a couple of key elements. Each video is Florence transforming through something that relates to her, whether it’s shedding a layer of her love or finding this younger version of herself, or leaving her family behind on the boat in Queen Of Peace and Long & Lost. What kept it together was that we just repeated the same concept, more or less. The segments are thematically, but not narratively connected. 

Dance was an integral part of the film, did that help or hinder in telling the story?

When someone’s singing and dancing, it’s really hard to tell a story – unless it’s something like West Side Story. But Florence had already written the music, so I couldn’t re-write her lyrics to get the viewer to understand. So that was a hurdle...

But then we watched [German dancer] Pina Bausch’s movies and you start to understand the emotional state of these people and the story. The most influential scene was where a man picks up a woman, kisses her and then drops her, picks her up and drops her and the dance goes on for ten minutes. It’s like visual rape, it’s so horrible. So we thought, let’s take these visual themes and add a little bit of narrative. 

What simplified it was that we knew the beginning and end of the story. In the beginning she’s Florence, she falls in love, she becomes all these other people and then at the end she returns to the stage and she’s Florence again.

How did you come to choose the different locations [Los Angeles, Merida in Mexico and the Scottish island of Easdale]?

If you’re from LA, a lot of the places we shot are super-iconic – the Chateau Marmont, the opening shot of the crucifix, the Palais Theatre in downtown LA, the streets of Hollywood. LA was always going to be the base, because that’s where the story originated, it’s where Florence fell in love with the guy who inspired The Odyssey.   

All the other characters or versions of her we felt should be outside of LA, because like the [original] Odyssey myth, or Dante’s Inferno, these characters have to journey through different worlds and times. For example, all the segments filmed in Mexico are set in the Fifties – it's suggested in the fact they're driving a vintage car, the way they’re dressed, even the way they’re talking. And the bits of the film that are set in Scotland [Queen of Peace and Long & Lost], it’s meant to be during the Seventies. It’s really subtle: I didn’t want it to be obvious. But we had distinct things that gave an other-worldly feeling like Florence was drifting through time and space.

The film is full of artistic, literary and theological references - why go down this route?

For instance, when Florence is crossing all these bridges in LA [below], that’s got an association with Dante’s Inferno and the bridges Dante crosses on the way down to hell. Then, in Delilah, there's a reference to Fuseli [the painting The Nightmare, which depicts a demon sitting on a woman’s chest].

We referenced every religious painting, every biblical story we could think of to help with the choreography. I knew nothing about dance: all my music videos up til then had been stories – [dance is] just not my thing. So when Ryan asked me what kind of dance we were going to do, I was like, ‘fuck, I don’t know!’ So I turned to paintings. I was pulling together all these Caravaggios and [Gustave] Dores. It was the only way I could communicate to Ryan and Holly what the movement should be.  

Which was the most challenging segment to film?

Either the end of Long & Lost, where they’re on the boat [below], because we had thirty minutes to shoot it and had to get the light perfect, and it was all one take so we couldn’t fuck it up. Being on a boat going out from the harbour in rough seas, it was really dangerous.

But also the very last video we shot for Third Eye was all one take. That was insanely hard. It turns from a music video to Florence actually singing a cappella. It was strange, because Everyone that was on that set had worked on the film since day one, I went into it thinking it was going to be a breeze, because we were all so in tune with each other. 

And it destroyed all of us. We almost failed - the video was going to have to be edited because we couldn’t get it in one shot. We had to do a little bit of visual effects to stitch one scene where the timing was off a little bit, but you can’t really notice. That was hard because of the pressure of failing at the last minute. At that point we knew we were going to release [The Odyssey] as one film. For me, it was a white-knuckler.

Florence has talked about the cathartic nature of the process of making the film, how much of a responsibility did you feel as the filmmaker towards her?

Tremendous. We went through a lot of stuff together and she changed so much. We’ve become incredibly close, I feel like she’s a sister now, we talk all the time…

I basically gave up an entire year of work to finish this project – financially, creatively, because it just meant so much to me and I was responsible to it. I had to have some really serious conversations with Park [Pictures] about not being able to do commercials because the film was booked on those days, and that was a lot of money to turn down. But I would never trade it.

I’ve been doing music videos for a long time and the opportunity doesn’t really ever arise to have that collaboration with someone like Florence. And it won’t happen again. Someone asked me, are you going to keep doing her videos when she writes the next album, and I said I don’t think it would be the right thing to do. I mean, I would love to work with her again, but how could we do it differently? We’d have to completely change it.

Has the experience made you want to do more of this kind of thing?

I don’t know if I’d want to do this for another musician, but I’ve always wanted to do features. I actually have a film in the works right now, and it’s something Florence might do with me. It wouldn’t be a musical film, and it wouldn’t be a film about Florence – she would be an actress playing a character. 

The Odyssey's US theatrical premiere is on 4 May at Village East Cinema, New York City. Watch the film online at florenceandthemachine.net