We got our first, tantalising look at Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller's latest film, Three Thousand Years Of Longing via the first teaser this week, and the new, main trailer is ready to sear itself onto your eyeballs with a vivid fantasy palette and crazy fantasy imagery. Take a look at the new movie, which stars Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba...
Based AS Byatt's short story The Djinn In The Nightingale’s Eye (and adapted by Miller working alongside his daughter, Augusta Gore) Longing follows Dr Alithea Binnie (Swinton) an widowed academic who is content with life and a creature of reason. While in Istanbul attending a conference, she happens to pick up a mysterious container which, as so often seems to happen in these stories, contains a Djinn (Elba) who offers her three wishes in exchange for his freedom.
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...
What some had thought might be a low-key two hander after the desert-set action madness of Fury Road instead turns out to span millennia, visiting the courts of the Queen of Sheba and the Ottoman rulers, the bedroom of a 19th Century Turkish slave courtesan, and all the way to present-day London. And every place recreated on stages in Australia after the pandemic forced a curtailing of a planned global shoot.
The movie will head to UK cinemas on 30 September.