THE ROAD TO AMALFI

A corollary of life on the road, is to build up a mental collection of favourite journeys. Most roads only offer a perfunctory way of getting from A to B, but then there are the gems where the journey itself becomes the main event. My home country, Scotland, has the A82 through Glencoe; America has the stretch through Monument Valley, Highway One and many more; Iceland has its entire ring road and then there is the Amalfi coastal road in southern Italy. 

It is almost incumbent on any movie director filming in the area, to emphatically locate the destination by celebrating the road. That is instructive as it suggests that to ignore the means of travel is to forget a prop.   

The road is terrifying and breathtaking as one: hugging the cliffs on one side and offering vistas of the Tyrrhenian Sea on the other.  John Steinbeck wrote of the terror of winding through the Amalfi Coast on a road that “corkscrewed on the edge of nothing”, clutched in his wife’s arms who was “weeping hysterically”.  Every hairpin bend is a prelude to a new visual feast, and none more so than the bend heading west before Atrani. I knew, at some stage, this bend would find itself in front of my camera.

My leaning was to style a 1970s period shoot with a model capable of capturing the effortless grace and sexuality of Italian models of the time. She had to own the scene without impairing the visual feast behind her. American Supermodel, Brooks Nader, works with us regularly and knew exactly what I wanted from her.  It all had to come together in the few moments when the police kindly closed the road; this was not a set for deliberating.