Three Thousand Years of Longing is Mad Max director’s epic fairy-tale movie that took him a quarter of a century to make – here’s why
- George Miller tells the Post he was seeking to create ‘transcendent moments’ in his latest film, starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba
- Co-written with his daughter Augusta Gore, the film, about an academic who encounters a wish-granting djinn, ‘deals with all the big issues in life’, he says
When George Miller was growing up in Queensland, Australia, in the mid-1950s, he and his twin brother John were gifted a vinyl record. On it was American film director Orson Welles narrating Oscar Wilde’s dreamy children’s fairy story, “The Happy Prince”.
“We played it a thousand times, over a year, two years,” he says. “It’s basically where I got my politics from, where I got the notion of the heroic gesture from. It just had everything in that story. That had a huge influence [on me].”
No surprise then that Miller eventually became a filmmaker, albeit by the way of studying medicine at the University of New South Wales.
But he has always believed in the power of magic and fables, shown through films such as The Witches of Eastwick (1987), which he directed, and the world of a talking pig in Babe (1995), which he produced and co-wrote.
It was during the mid-’90s, when Babe took US$254.1 million worldwide and was nominated for seven Oscars, winning one, that Miller encountered A.S. Byatt’s novella “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”.