THE scholar

George Miller, through the lens of Tilda Swinton

For Tilda Swinton, Three Thousand Years of Longing began where all projects should start: at a friendly Cannes Film Festival luncheon. “I had the extraordinarily graceful occasion to sit down opposite George Miller. I knew nobody and was certainly feeling too shy to talk to anybody,” she recalls. “As I think probably happens quite often with George, he just starts talking to people that he’s never met, and we became friends within the course of half an hour.”

It may be true that Miller is true is that Swinton seems to have been tailormade to play Alithea, the curious, enigmatic scholar who barely blinks when a Djinn appears before her to offer three wishes, and Miller had likely clocked that long before this festive lunch.

When she was eventually given the script to read, Swinton says, “There was a sense that it was a beautiful read, but how would we keep it intact?” She fell in love with the narrative journey of these two unlikely soulmates, she feared how tricky it might be to bring a cinema audience along for the ride. “There’s a contract where there’s a leap that the audience is going to have to take, or not,” she describes. “The sense of stepping into a fable. And it’s an extraordinary achievement on George’s part to keep that balloon up in the air, because it’s a about fantastical truth.”

Alithea shares almost all of her while we travel with him alone to the many chapters of history and fantasy he details. And yet, Swinton smiles at the notion that a chamber piece. “Yes, it’s two characters in a hotel room, but they have access to all of these

Miller was open to the discoveries the two actors made as they played through their scenes together. And it made navigatthat much more possible. “Both of these characters are out of their comfort zones,” Swinton says. “Both of them are on a precipice. It’s like two people meeting around the back of the bike sheds; they’re both slightly ill at ease. She wants him to say, ‘Oh, forget about it, I believe you don’t want anything. I’ll make an exception in your case.’ And he wants her to say, ‘Oh, alright, I’ll make a couple of wishes.’ But, as it goes on, it becomes quite come to an agreement.”

She describes the experience on set as one of the most beautiful of her life, crediting Miller with fostering an atmosphere of intimacy that folded into the story being told. “For me, he’s a master and I mean that in the truly classical sense,” Swinton says. “It felt like I was working with Hitchcock. It felt like a masterclass every day to watch him shoot, to direct the camera, to direct the set. He believes in the camera’s ability to tell the story,

She remembers the conversations they would have on set, marveling at how Miller would contemplate every story thread by tracking back, always starting with the opening shot of the through to whatever particular narrative question he faced in a given moment. “He couldn’t spot check,” she says. “He couldn’t, or he didn’t. He certainly didn’t ever want to spot check and surgical strike. It was always about how every moment was linked to what had come before it. The whole skeleton had to be redrawn.”

Miller, Swinton says in summary, is a director “enchanted by cinema. And he wants to be enchanted; he wants to remain enchanted.”