When George Miller was growing up in Queensland, Australia, in the mid-1950s, he and his twin brother John were gifted a vinyl record. On it was American film director Orson Welles narrating Oscar Wilde’s dreamy children’s fairy story, The Happy Prince. “We played it a thousand times, over a year, two years,” he says. “It’s basically where I got my...
Tilda Swinton as Alithea in a still from Three Thousand Years of Longing, co-written and directed by George Miller.When George Miller was growing up in Queensland, Australia, in the mid-1950s, he and his twin brother John were gifted a vinyl record. On it was American film director Orson Welles narrating Oscar Wilde’s dreamy children’s fairy story, The Happy Prince.
But he has always believed in the power of magic and fables, shown through films such as The Witches of Eastwick , which he directed, and the world of a talking pig in Babe , which he produced and co-wrote. While Byatt granted him the rights to adapt it, it has taken Miller close to a quarter of a century to bring it to the big screen. Sidetracked by other films, he was always chipping away at the script.
But it still took a further seven years, partly due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which meant that the delayed US$60 million production had to be entirely shot in Sydney, Australia.When he met Tilda Swinton, the flame-haired Scottish star of Michael Clayton and Memoria, he felt immediately she was ideal to play Dr Alithea Binnie, a narratologist who travels to Türkiye for a conference, where she meets the djinn – a sprite that has been trapped inside a trinket for three millennia.
“That’s the nature of [Cannes],” says Miller, who has served on the festival jury in the past. “The unexpected makes it memorable. I’m not saying that slapping someone at the Oscars is necessarily a good thing. But someone doing this is great. The unusual is what stands out.”When the early reviews dropped, the suggestion was that it was merely a palate cleanser between Mad Max movies.
Moreover, it’s an elegant ode to storytelling. When Alithea refuses the djinn’s offer of three wishes in exchange for his freedom, he tells his tale, one that transports us back to a world of sultans, concubines and even the Queen of Sheba.“He’s a mess,” Miller laughs when he speaks of the pointy-eared, lovelorn djinn. “I mean, Idris said [it] … he said, ‘The guy really screws up every time.’”