Florence + The Machine teamed up with Vincent Haycock again for a short film featuring “Queen of Peace” and “Long & Lost” off How Big How Blue How Beautiful. The video is centered around a community living on the Scottish coastline and Florence Welch serves as a kind of intermediary. Haycock also directed the other four music videos off this album.
We filmed ‘Queen of Peace’ and ‘Long & Lost’ in Scotland, one of my favorite places I’ve ever been to or filmed. The coast of Scotland is breathtaking, beautiful and harsh, an aesthetic mix that both Florence and I have been very interested in during the making of these videos. The Scottish people are amazing and especially the town of Easdale, the small island that we lived on and filmed. We shot in the winter and it was cold, brutal and endlessly inspiring, which I think really helped the story of Florence’s struggle with her family, the younger innocence vs. the feuding violence of the men around her, etc. The end of the video was done in a single take, at the very last seconds of light during a stormy barge ride on a freezing sea. The effort and focus on both the actors and crew was so amazing, Florence delivers one of my favorite moments to date and it’s one of my proudest technical and narrative accomplishments.
Watch it above.