The first look trailer for George Martin’s upcoming epic fantasy romance, Three Thousand Years of Longing, has just been released and it looks like it may do for fantasy movies what his Mad Max series did for post-apocalyptic sci-fi.
The trailer offers the very first look at star Idris Elba as the Djinn (aka Genie). Miller has said that the film will center on and spring from a conversation between the Djinn and a scholar, played by Tilda Swinton. If the trailer is any indication, the conversation will serve up plenty of action-packed segues delivered in Miller’s inimitable style — perhaps answering the question, “Do djinns have car chases?
From there, the trailer is simply a mad swirl of images straight out of a retelling of 1001 Arabian Nights. The Djinn grants the scholar three wishes, and while she tries to figure out how best to phrase them in order to escape any Monkey Paw-type side effect he tells her stories from over the three thousand years of his existence — presumably the trailer shows snippets of them in rapid-fire delivery.
Though it certainly seems epic in scope Miller describes the film as more intimate than his other films, even telling Deadline that the film is something like an “anti-Mad Max.” He elaborated:
“But when I say it’s the anti-Mad Max, I mean it only in the sense that it’s got way more dialogue than the very laconic Fury Road. Most of that was shot on location in the deserts of Southern Africa. This one was shot basically indoors, with only a couple of outdoor scenes. Its scale is smaller, at least in terms of its physical scale, even though, yes, it is set over 3,000 years. But also, Fury Road was a story that essentially happened over three days and two nights, and this happened over 3,000 years, so that’s what I meant by the anti-Mad Max.”
The film will premiere later this week at the Cannes Film Festival.
