George Miller has gotten his green light and a March production start in Australia on
Three Thousand Years Of Longing, with
Idris Elba and
Tilda Swinton now locked to star. That Miller is making this film isn’t a surprise: independent distributors rarely get a shot at a big ticket film from a commercially successful auteur like Miller as he was coming off his Best Picture nominated Warner Bros blockbuster
Mad Max: Fury Road. FilmNation had a crowd eager to open their wallets for international rights when the script was shown to buyers at 2018’s AFM. CAA Media Finance is selling North American and Chinese distribution rights and FilmNation is finishing overseas sales, but Miller has the money he needs to make his movie.
Miller, who is producing with Doug Mitchell, spoke to Deadline this week about the formal setting of a start date that will move from Australia to London and Istanbul, but he wasn’t eager to give away the store. The genial filmmaker — whose career started with 1979’s no-budget
Mad Max and culminated in 2015’s $150 million budget
Mad Max: Fury Road – said he preferred to remain circumspect on the new film and exactly what Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton will be doing in the lead roles. But he had a lot to say on everything from a search for substance that leads him to take his time between films, to his position in the debate on superhero films as cinema, to what is happening with the
Fury Road sequel.
“Look, I’m happy to talk about the new film very elliptically, but I’ve always felt that if you talk about these films before they’re actually completed, you jinx them,” he told Deadline. “And ultimately until it’s done you don’t know what it is. 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. 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],” he said. “It’s a movie that is very strongly visually, 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.”
How did Miller arrive on Elba and Swinton?
“It arose out of the characters as written,” he said. “I met both of them at some events at separate times and the moment I got to talk to them, they suddenly just slotted into the roles. I was really very happy they were available and interested and that they responded very well to the material. My hope is they will be doing something quite different than either of them has done before. I know I’m being a bit enigmatic but I don’t want to say more about the content of the film.”
If the title is a riddle, it is something that Miller has puzzled over for a long time.
“I guess I’m hardwired to story in some way, and for me what happens is, stories seed in your head and they rattle around,” Miller said. “It becomes rather Darwinian, survival of the fittest: the ones that have the most comprehensive promise are the ones that survive. This story I have been working on and thinking about for at least 15 years. There would always be several of these stories in my mind and it’s interesting, the ones that tend to fall away and why they fall away. The ones that are more insistent are usually so because they tick a lot of boxes and organically do a lot of things.”
Like what?
“The best way I can say it is, I really like stories where there is a lot of iceberg under the tip,” Miller said. “Too often, a story can be quite dazzling but it’s amazing how quickly you can forget about it. I must say, going back to Mad Max: Fury Road, that was the thing that satisfied me the most. For a film like that, it could have been read just on the surface. It was very, very hard to get in a lot of subtext and exposition while you are on the run. That was the formal exercise of that film and I was really happy when people started to read a lot of stuff underneath that film. They saw the allegory. I think that’s why the film got traction to the extent it did. That’s my hope on this film even though you never know until it’s out there and people tell you what the film is.”
When I tell Miller how obsessed I became about the mutant guitar virtuoso strapped to the front of a post-apocalyptic speaker-laden vehicle to provide the frantic soundtrack to the mayhem and Cirque du Soleil-like aerial attackers pole vaulting and trying to stop the truck driven by Charlize Theron’s Furioso character and Tom Hardy’s Mad Max as they carted away the runaway virgin brides of the bizarre masked leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), Miller said that character is a good example of what he strived for. Sure, the character – called Coma-Doof Warrior – was a visual spectacle, an apocalyptic Eddie Van Halen complete with flames shooting out of his musical instrument – but Miller laid out for me an entire backstory for the character that viewers never saw.
“I would like to think he’s still alive, somehow,” Miller said as I expressed hope that the character returns for the next film even though his condition at film’s end was uncertain. “In fact, we’ve got a whole backstory on how he came to be in that position. I often think about it. The approach to the film was, you have to be able to explain everything. Not only all the characters, but every object, how it all found its way into this world and how it survived. In his case, he was blind from birth. When things started going a bit crazy, he and his mother were left in a mining town. The only way they could survive was to go into a place where there was a competitive advantage to being blind. And that was to go deep down into a mine shaft where they were able to survive. He took what was most precious to him, a musical instrument, probably a guitar.”
