When I meet up with George Miller, Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton at the Majestic Hotel in Cannes, they’re just about five hours away from the world premiere of their film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, at the sacred church of cinema, the Theatre Lumiere.
“I can't hide my excitement,” says Miller as soon as we begin our conversation. It’s been a long time coming: he first read A.S. Byatt’s short story The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye in the late ‘90s and has been thinking about making a film based on it ever since. So, after the Oscar-winning Mad Max: Fury Road, he felt it was finally the right time to explore this story, which centers on a narratologist (Swinton) who discovers a Djin (Elba) that grants her three wishes. The pair, holed up in a hotel room in Istanbul, share stories from their pasts and find themselves breaking through the loneliness they’ve carried around inside themselves for years (or in the Djinn’s case, thousands of years).
A timely reflection on loneliness and love, Three Thousand Years is also a wildly imaginative story full of magic that jumps through time and space — or as Elba and Swinton put it, “a George Miller leap.” And because the film also explores the importance and significance of storytelling, I dug in with the trio behind it on how they wanted to tell this story in a new way, the pros and cons of tropes, and what stories from their past still stick with them today.
George, I know you first stumbled upon the short story in the '90s, so when did it become the story you were going to tell next?
George Miller: Well, it just insisted on being made. All the stories banging around your head, it's definitely the one, of all the ones that you're thinking about, some of which never get made, and the time has passed for it. But this is one that said, "Whatever happens, we've got to make them." And you've just got to be really grateful that all the pieces fall into place. I must say of all the films I've ever made, it's the one in which I think the highest level of craft, on everyone's part, was there, that's my feeling. If it was the diving in the Olympics, it would score a high degree of difficulty. You had to maintain its nuance, and it was tricky to sort of manage that.
It's really interesting, when you make films, it takes a while, sometimes 10 years, before everyone settles on what the film meant or not to people. It really used to take 10 years. The first couple movies I made, it took a while for that to sort of be settled. Now that's getting really, really rapid. I mean, what I found really surprising on Fury Road was just how quick, it took about a year for it to settle. Now it's happening much more quickly. And I said this to another film director. He said, "George, they're in the cinema [motions tapping on his phone]... It's already getting out there." And that's a really, really interesting thing.
So you think it'll be an hour after the screening?
Miller: [Laughs.]I don't know. No, I think it takes a bit more. I'm rambling again, but it's really quite the thing when you realize that people have read your film with all the stuff that you try to get in there, but more, and they interpret it in different ways, that's always exciting. That's the most fascinating thing, in a way, the most rewarding thing, then if you're a storyteller. I'm still trying to figure out what that process is, not only how to tell stories, but why we tell stories.
Tilda and Idris, what are your earliest memories about getting involved in this story?
Tilda Swinton: I know exactly when we met because it was exactly five years ago because it was at a birthday lunch for Cannes and at its 70th birthday. And I sat opposite George, not knowing anybody on the table, and feeling very shy and started talking to him. And only 15 minutes in, did I realized it was George Miller. And then the evening we hung out also, we sat together for dinner with Bong Joon-Ho. We just sort of hung out basically. And then about a year later you sent me a script.
And what did you think of it?
Swinton: I just saw it. I just saw, oh wow. This is, George Miller's making this? It was his kind of leap, he always leaps in different directions, but it was a leap, a beautiful leap, like a portal. And then when we spoke on the phone, I was actually in upstate New York, I was shooting with Jim Jarmusch, and I remember exactly where I was when we were talking, and Idris' name came up very quickly.
And, Idris, what do you remember about how this script came to you?
Idris Elba: It came the traditional way. It was my agent Roger, who's been my agent for a long time, so we're friends, and I get this call and he says, "George Miller wants to talk to you." And the way he said it and I said it, we knew that was like being told that-
Swinton: That's the sentence you want to hear.
Elba: It's like, right. Put your best suit on, you're walking up those stairs in the clouds. And I got to read this thing. I had to read it a couple of times, because I was like, huh. I was like you, this is a leap. This is an incredible George Miller leap.
Miller: Both of you, I knew your work and I'd seen you, but I had no idea who you were as people. And it was the BAFTAS and we just incidentally met Idris here, and the moment I meant Idris, you were very warm, but I didn't think of the Djin until [Tilda was] cast. And then we were on the phone, and Idris said, "I want to do the film, but can we shoot all the stories of the flashback story before we work with Tilda?" And I said, quite honestly, I hadn't even thought about it. But they are filmmaker-actors, meaning that they're there to get, not just to do their job — they see the whole thing. They see their work in the context of the whole, which is people who work collaboratively and ensemble really understand that, it's evident in everything you two do. Everyone knows that Fury Road didn't go so well — not necessarily an individual's fault, but there was enough resources in most of what we were doing to overcome the dysfunction, and all and the issues between Tom [Hardy] and Charlize [Theron]. Well here, it was completely different.
Anyway, Idris on the phone said, "Okay, I'm in the car, I'm heading to the airport and I'll speak to you later." And the next thing, I don't know if it was a day later or hours later, suddenly I get a picture of Idris sitting on Tilda's lawn on her farm in Scotland. And by coincidence, you're doing a concert, it's by the lake.
Swinton: By Loch Ness.
Miller: By Loch Ness?
Swinton: RockNess.
Miller: What's that?
Swinton: It's called RockNess [Music Festival].
Elba: I came for a music gig, and I was playing Tech-House.
Swinton: So, he came for tea, and it was great.
How else did those early conversations shape these characters?
Swinton: I think one thing that was really clear immediately in all our early conversations, when we were getting to know each other, was we really wanted something authentic. We wanted minimal acting, we wanted to access something unforced, and unfake, and unseen before, and in terms of our work, we both wanted to go to slightly mixed, slightly different shades than we'd made before. And also we wanted the Djin and the academic to be different from any Djins you'd ever seen before and any academics you'd ever seen before. And so we were very aware of all the tropes and all the, it was like a forest of possibilities. And so the first part of our work was identifying what those pitfalls might be and just working out how to avoid them. And then adjacent to that, finding out what would be the anchors of those authentic kind of energies. What would make the Djin as Idris-like as possible, and what would make Alithea as Tilda-like as possible, and just identifying that.
I've never seen a Djin like that. We've all seen angry, domineering trickster Djins. I don't think we've ever seen such a sort of doubt-filled, vulnerable-
Elba: Vulnerable, broken-
Swinton: Broken Djin.
Miller: The biggest thing I've noticed as a filmmaker is the way we fall into tropes so easily. I remember a friend of mine had a script he wanted to make. It was sort of an action movie where a gun had fallen to the floor and they're struggling for the gun. And I said, "How many times have you seen that?" And he said "A lot." And it suddenly occurred to me, I've done it in a movie, I've fallen into it! I made a movie where that thing happened! So you've got to avoid it.
Swinton: But the tricky thing is that there is a value to those tropes. It may not always be that one wants them present, but it is a sort of lexicon, it is a sort of vernacular in the cinematic language. And so one needs to know them to sometimes sprinkle them in.
Elba: Or avoid them-
Swinton: Or play or avoid them.
Miller: It's not only avoiding, but play off them. If I had someone dropping a gun in the movie, I'd have them maybe drop them, flick it up with their hands and get it again, just to play off that. And that happens all the time. We do it in all of our lives, particularly in unfamiliar moments. I remember many years ago, I was a junior doctor. And we were in a big city hospital and someone had come in with cardiac arrest. I remember all the other doctors and staff looked at me and it meant that I had to write up the case, but I had to tell the family that this person had died. We had no education in that way. And so, I remember walking into the room where the family was and just as I was walking in, I thought, “what do I do?” And, of course, the only experience I've ever had was from the movies. So I walked in and I saw this older woman and her adult daughter and a young Catholic priest there waiting. And they looked at me waiting for the news. And all I did was [shakes his head “no”] because I'd seen it endlessly in movies. And the most amazing thing is they'd never been in that experience before, and they behaved exactly like people in a film, I felt like I was watching a movie in the way they held each other and started to cry.
Idris, how did you think about avoiding such tropes with the Djin?
Elba: One of the big junctions for me were when we began to sort of understand how he would sound, his language, his accent. The trope is obvious: he's Arabian. He has some sort of accent, and George and I really discussed that and we wanted to avoid that. And so we kicked around the tires a lot, thinking about regions, thinking about the Djin versus genie, thinking about 3,000 years of longing, and then it's almost as an accident, I began to sort of just speak, because I wanted to get my tongue into a place that was unfamiliar. And that became what we started to describe as Djinish, the language of the Djin, is the language that you won't understand, but he understands, and it is what he speaks naturally. Its origins really, when people, some in religious terms, they say speaking tongues, and it's kind of like stuff that just starts to roll off your tongue in your heightened, spiritual state. This was the first for me — I've never created a language.
I’d love to end this with each of you sharing a story from your own childhood that sticks with you even now.
Miller: Back in the early 50s, at Christmas in, again, pre-television, my parents brought my twin brother and I a vinyl disc of stories that had The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. It was narrated Orson Welles, it was produced by Orson Welles. My brother and I listened to that a thousand times over and over again. And I realized my politics came from that story because it was about poverty. My understanding of the hero myth was seeded in that story. It was a story that had absolutely everything in it. And it still inspires me today.
Elba: When I was very young, my dad told me his story. He said in their small village, the police came around saying, “Have you seen this this girl” and they had a hand-sketched drawing. And my dad at the time, he said, "Yeah, I gave her a lift the other evening." So the police said, “tell us the story.” He was driving along and saw this girl and she seemed a little distressed. He pulled over and said, "Can I help you?" And she was crying. She said, "Yeah, I just want to ride." So he gave her a lift. She said, "Oh, I just get off here. This is my road." He dropped her off, and he closed the door, and he was wondering about her. She was crying. And he drove along. He was going back to where he lived, which was about two miles in the other direction. And as he got to a hill with a little lamppost, there on the bridge was the same girl. But he had dropped her off two miles away. And he went home and he got the chills of his life. What he thinks happened is that this was a ghost that he had taken. And I remember him telling me this story and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It's a creepy story and it stuck with me.
Swinton: I genuinely believed that, in where I was brought up in rural Scotland, there were magic animals, and I was always looking for them. And to be honest with you, I still do. In the woods, if I see something, I'm expecting to see a white hart, which is the sort of ancient white deer with a glowing heart. Always, even to this day, expecting to see it. That's not a story so much, but it's a belief.
Elba: When I went to RockNess, I saw Loch Ness.
Swinton: Of course, you did. Know what Nessie says? I was there and I saw Idris Elba!
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George Miller Has a Story to Tell in Three Thousand Years of Longing - Vanity Fair
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