During an interview with Deadline, Oscar-winning filmmaker George Miller revealed that his upcoming feature Three Thousand Years of Longing will begin production in March 2021 in Australia, with Golden Globe winner Idris Elba (Luther) and Oscar winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton) attached to star. Very little is known about the film, with Miller saying he feels like it’s a “jink” to “talk about these films before they’re actually completed,” but he did share that the project is the “anti-Mad Max.”
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“I see the title of this film as a riddle, and it’s more or less at heart a two-hander, even though it’s way more complex than that,” said Miller. “Tilda and Idris are the two characters at the center of this thing. I can’t even decide what genre it is, to be honest. And that’s a good thing. I like to think in these days that to have a chance of people taking notice of what you’re doing, without being overly flamboyant, your film needs to be uniquely familiar. That’s the term I use. The audience is looking for that, something that seems fresh and atypical. In this case, every time I think, oh it’s this kind of film, I say yes but also it’s that kind of film. I would hope that translates into people feeling that what we’re trying to do is interesting.”
“One thing I can tell you; it’s not [another Fury Road]. It’s a movie that is very strongly visual, but it’s almost the opposite of Fury Road. It’s almost all interior and there’s a lot of conversation in it. There are action scenes, but they are by the by and I guess you could say it’s the anti-Mad Max.”
Speaking of Mad Max, Miller shared that he’s “not done with the Mad Max story” and that there is “another Mad Max coming down the pike” revealing that they are in preparation on the next project even as Three Thousand Years of Longing enters pre-production.
“It’s an interesting question, the idea of multi-tasking. I discuss this with other filmmakers and I think what happens to me is that when you’re working on one thing, and you get so distracted and focused on that one thing, it’s like a creative holiday to focus on the other one for a bit. It helps you achieve that objectivity, to look at the thing afresh each time and say, I thought I was doing this, but it doesn’t seem to be the case now.”
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Miller also gave his opinion on the debate about whether superhero films “qualify as cinema,” saying that to him, “it’s all cinema.”
“I watch all of them. To be honest, in terms of this debate, cinema is cinema and it’s a very broad church. The test, ultimately, is what it means to the audience. There’s a great quote I saw that applies to all we do. It was from the Swahili storytellers. Each time they finished a story they would say, ‘The story has been told. If it was bad, it was my fault because I am the storyteller. And if it was good, it belongs to everybody,'” Miller said.
“It’s a mistake and a kind of hubris if a film does well at the box office to dismiss it as clever marketing or something else. There’s more happening there, and it’s our obligation as storytellers to really try and understand it. To me, it’s all cinema. I don’t think you can ghettoize it and say, oh this is cinema or that is cinema. It applies to all the arts, to literature, the performing arts, painting and music, in all its form. It’s such a broad spectrum, a wide range and to say that anyone is more significant or more important than the other, is missing the point. It’s one big mosaic and each bit of work fits into it,” he added.
(Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
