Although the Three Thousand Years of Longing by George Miller takes place over millennia, the time between George Miller movies often seems to drag on. The 77-year-old filmmaker is now back with a film that has been in the works for two decades and has a lot on its mind about what's transient and what's eternal, seven years after Miller's Fury Road blazed its way across movie screens.
In the upcoming film Three Thousand Years of Longing, starring Tilda Swinton as an academic named Alithea who specialises in "narratology" (the study of stories about stories), a wish-granting djinn (played by Idris Elba) emerges from an antique glass bottle purchased in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar.
When she is unable to think of any wishes, he tells her tales spanning 3,000 years, which propel the movie through time and ultimately deepen the bond between Alithea and the djinn. Three Thousand Years, a film based on an A.S. Byatt short story, would triumph over Fury Road's violent, unambiguous plot arc if it followed the latter's ruminative time-jumping style. It is a small-scale chamber piece with epic proportions.
When Swinton, Elba, and Miller got together earlier this year in a hotel room in Cannes, France, it was just before The Thousand Years of Longing had its red carpet debut and Miller's Fury Road sequel, Furiosa, was ramping up production back in Australia. Swinton referred to it as "big cinema."
In the discussion that followed, the trio were clearly enthralled to be together again after shooting the film through the pandemic, and still animated by the movie’s ideas and its widescreen ambitions. “The faith to throw oneself over the highest bar,” Swinton said of Miller’s long-gesticulating endeavor. “Who better to jump that bar?”
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