George Miller is at the Cannes Film Festival making “Furiosa” (that’s right)
CANNES, FRANCE » On Tuesday, just a few days after the premiere of his latest movie, “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” at the Cannes Film Festival, Australian director George Miller was set to head home to direct “Furiosa,” the fourth installment in his phantasmagoric “Mad Max” series.
“The cast is already out there,” he said Saturday. “They’ve been shooting second unit.” Miller has been working on “Furiosa” in between screenings, interviews and having what looks like a very good time at the festival. “Nowadays, modern communication allows you to be there,” he said, obviously pleased with his multitasking. “It’s really great.”
Miller is a Cannes veteran, but while he’s served on three of the festival’s juries in 30 years, only two of his movies have been presented here, both out of competition. The last time was for his masterpiece “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which set the festival afire in 2015. Audiences and critics alike gave the movie plenty of love, and it received a whopping 10 Oscar nominations, winning half a dozen statuettes. Predictably, though, it lost best picture to “Spotlight,” which encapsulates the kind of self-flattering, ostensibly serious work the academy has historically embraced.
“When we congregate with strangers in the dark,” Miller once said, “it’s a kind of dreaming.” Sometimes those dreams are nightmares.
It takes about a day to fly between Australia and France. Miller, who turned 77 in March, will be making the trip twice in less than a week, but if he was tired, he didn’t look it. To escape the din of the crowds, we met on the terrace at the office of Filmnation, which is handling the new movie’s international distribution and sales. A colleague had described Miller as professorial and alerted me that he was prone to digressions, a trait that the filmmaker cheerfully volunteered as he issued forth on movies, Einstein, the forces of the universe, Joseph Campbell and how cellphones use relativity to work.
Einstein makes a special appearance in “Three Thousand Years,” which is as nearly unclassifiable as its director. As the title suggests, the movie spans millenniums to tell the sweeping story of an ancient djinn (Idris Elba) and a modern-day scholar, Alithea (Tilda Swinton). She’s traveled to Turkey for a conference — Alithea studies narratives, puzzling through them just like Miller does — but her plans take an unforeseen turn when she opens a peculiar blueand-white-striped bottle that she’s bought, inadvertently releasing the djinn from a long captivity.
What follows is a fantastical fable of love and suffering, imprisonment and release, mythology and the material world.
The djinn tries to grant her three wishes, but it gets complicated. Instead, he starts recounting episodes from his long life, all involving women and intrigues that led to his repeat captivity. He tells stories, but so does Alithea, who also narrates. As the movie continues, it shifts between the Cgi-heavy past and the present, always returning to the djinn and Alithea, who grow progressively close. “Three Thousand Years” is essentially about storytelling, which means it’s about desire: The yearning expressed in the djinn’s tales, the longing awakened in Alithea and the craving the viewer has to find out what happens next.
“Three Thousand Years” is based on “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” a story in a collection from British writer A.S. Byatt. Miller doesn’t read fiction (he did as a kid), but someone rightly sussed that he might like the book. He was especially taken with “Nightingale” — “it kept playing in my mind as stories do” — and secured the rights. Miller said that Byatt was surprised he had singled out this story, which she’d written quickly. But it was also grounded in her own life history. She too had once gone to a conference in Istanbul. Everything in the story is true, she told him, except for the djinn.
Miller wrote the script with his daughter, Augusta Gore; his wife, Margaret Sixel, edited the movie. She’s edited several of his other movies, winning an Oscar for “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Miller clearly likes creating in a familial setup and has worked with some crew members repeatedly, including cinematographer John Seale, who shot “Three Thousand Years” and “Fury Road.” Miller has been with one of his collaborators, Guy Norris, for 41 years; Norris was the stunt coordinator on “The Road Warrior” (aka “Mad Max 2”) and is serving as the second-unit director on “Furiosa.”