The first teaser for Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing teases the onslaught of creativity and imagination to come in the filmmaker’s epic romantic fantasy. Starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, the first footage (which comes courtesy of MGM) from Three Thousand Years of Longing is an onslaught of intense, fantastical imagery, with more to come in the full-length trailer this Friday.
Along with the teaser, an official synopsis for Three Thousand Years of Longing has also now been released. Based on the short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A.S. Byatt, Three Thousand Years of Longing follows “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.
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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.”
Three Thousand Years of Longing sounds like an incredible journey into the profound, centering on a conversation between two characters that will unleash all manner of fascinating adventures and morality tales—allowing George Miller to once again demonstrate why he is considered one of the most exciting filmmakers working today.
Directed by George Miller, who co-wrote the screenplay with Augusta Gore, Three Thousand Years of Longing stars Idris Elba as the Djinn, Tilda Swinton as Alithea, Aamito Lagum as Queen of Sheba, Burcu Gölgedar as Zefir, and Matteo Bocelli as Prince Mustafa.
George Miller Has Described Three Thousand Years of Longing as the Anti-Mad Max
FilmNation Entertainment
While George Miller exploded back onto the big screen with 2015’s sublime action flick Mad Max: Fury Road, the director has called Three Thousand Years of Longing a “palate-cleanser” compared to his return to the post-apocalyptic world of desperate people hunting for guzzolene. “Well, it’s certainly a palate-cleanser for Fury Road,” Miller explained. “And there was a lot of pressure to go straight into another [Mad Max movie]. In a way, things got chaotic with the studio going through changes of regimes, and I knew I really wanted to make this film regardless.”
Miller continued, explaining how the dialogue-heavy fantasy epic is different from his most well-known franchise. “But when I say it’s the anti-Mad Max, I mean it only in the sense that it’s got way more dialogue than the very laconic Fury Road,” he said. “Most of that was shot on location in the deserts of Southern Africa. This one was shot basically indoors, with only a couple of outdoor scenes. Its scale is smaller, at least in terms of its physical scale, even though, yes, it is set over 3,000 years. But also, Fury Road was a story that essentially happened over three days and two nights, and this happened over 3,000 years, so that’s what I meant by the anti-Mad Max.”
Three Thousand Years of Longing is scheduled to premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival in May 2022.
