George Miller unleashes his mad talent in ‘Three Thousand Years Of Longing’
Time and time again Australian filmmaker George Miller has proven that he’s a creative genius of untapped potential and now he’s ready to whisk audiences away on a crazy, fantastical, and mind-altering journey of discovery, potential and desire in Three Thousand Years Of Longing.
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Here’s the official synopsis:
Dr Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is an academic – content with life and a creature of reason. While in Istanbul attending a conference, she happens to encounter a Djinn (Idris Elba) who offers her three wishes in exchange for his freedom.
This presents two problems. First, she doubts that he is real and second, because she is a scholar of story and mythology, she knows all the cautionary tales of wishes gone wrong. The Djinn pleads his case by telling her fantastical stories of his past. Eventually she is beguiled and makes a wish that surprises them both.
Bathed in colour, light and fantastical imagery, George Miller’s Three Thousand Years Of Longing which is adapted from the notable short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A. S. Byatt is a fantasy film of epic proportions and this looks utterly mesmerizing in its construction and presentation.
Miller has proven that he is a master of the cinematic craft with his work on Mad Max: Fury Road seen as work that elevated the cinematic craft to a brand new level, and he’s ready to bring an incredibly bold new vision to life with Three Thousand Yeard Of Longing.
“It’s a story that seemed to probe many of the mysteries and paradoxes of life, and so succinctly” Miller recalls. “Once read it stayed with me, as some stories tend to do…then, one day it occurred to me that it should be a film.”
“It felt unique, something that you couldn’t quite fit into any genre and it ticked one very important box – there must be a whole lot more to it than meets the eye. There are stories within stories, a little like One Thousand and One Nights” says Miller.
Miller’s production company, Kennedy Miller Mitchell, bought the rights to the story in the late 1990s. Miller collaborated on the screenplay with Augusta Gore.
The Djinn admits to being too fond of the company of women. Through him we meet the Queen of Sheba, a slave and a genius. Gore adds: “The novella comments on the notion of women operating powerfully from positions of powerlessness”.
As the screenplay developed, in and around his other output, Miller was conscious that the film would be very different to his previous feature, 2015’s post-apocalyptic Mad Max: Fury Road.
“Fury Road was mostly set outdoors, this film is mostly indoors,” he notes. “Fury Road had little dialogue; in this film a large part of the action happens through the discourse between Alithea and the Djinn. Fury Road played out in a compressed time frame – three days and two nights. This story happens over three thousand years.”
Both Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton are perfectly cast in the respective roles and will bring a quniue sense of chemistry as they unravel this gigantic story.
Three Thousand Years Of Longing has already taken the Cannes Film Festival by storm, and where at the close of the credits it received a six-minute standing ovation. The film is currently being touted as a potential Best Picture winner by some, and Miller has confirmed that his focus is to see it released in cinemas the way that movies are meant to be seen.
Three Thousand Years Of Longing will be released in cinemas on September 1.
Images: Roadshow Films