If you need four words to make even the most jaded movie lover smile from ear to ear, try "new George Miller movie." The director of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD returns to the big screen this year with THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING. The fantasy film adopts a short story by author A.S. Byatt and concerns an encounter between a woman (Tilda Swinton) and a djinn (Idris Elba). Three wishes come into play, and the consequences of their meeting are intense.
Based on that brief description, it’s easy to imagine how this movie could take many different forms. But this is George Miller. This is the man who completely rewrote our expectations for an action movie with FURY ROAD. It should come as no surprise that THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING is a visually intense, explosively colorful spectacle that may be one of the most beautiful things we see all year.
When Can You See Three Thousand Years of Longing?
George Miller's new movie opens exclusively in movie theatres on August 26.
Watch the Three Thousand Years of Longing Trailer
Let's begin with the obvious. We would watch Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba banter as they shoveled gravel into a dump truck for three hours. So George Miller did more than half the work of getting us into the theatre with that casting alone. (This casting led to our favorite Reddit comment of the year so far: "Only George Miller would have a normal-person-meets-genie movie and cast Tilda Swinton...as the normal person.")
Beyond the casting, THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING looks like a swirl of amazing images. The visual invention on display here is over the top and more than we would even expect from Miller.
The Song in the Three Thousand Years of Longing Trailer
Did you end that trailer wanting to hear that song? It's "2020" by the band Suuns. The track is about ten years old, and has shown up in a few other trailers, and was just recently in the Amazon series "Outer Range." (It also sounds a lot like the band Clinic, but Clinic and Suuns do not share any members.
The Original Story
This movie adapts A.S. Byatt's short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye," which was published in 1994. That was a hot era for Byatt, who was already well-respected as a writer. In 1990 she won the Booker Prize for the novel "Possession," and in 1995 a movie called ANGELS & INSECTS was released, and eventually Oscar-nominated, based on the novella "Morpho Eugenia."
In the trailer above, you can see glimpses of the original short story (which you can read at The Paris Review) but it also seems that Miller and co-writer Augusta Gore (who, by the way, is his daughter) have used the story as a jumping-off point for many of their own ideas and fantasies. Miller has wanted to adapt this story to film for decades, and it tells Deadline that "was always around, and we kept working on it" even as he made other movies.
A Storytelling Tradition
The story in THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING spans thousands of years, as the title suggests — mostly as the Djinn tells lecturer Alithea Binnie stories about his eons of existence and experience. The relationship to "The One Thousand and One Nights," or "The Arabian Nights," is clear. And that allows Miller to do two things at once: He gets to revel in the interplay between Swinton and Elba as they are in her character's hotel room and to weave this fantastic spectacle as the Djinn tells his stories.
THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING opens on August 26.
All images courtesy of MGM.