Academy Award-winning director George Miller has provided further insight into his upcoming epic fantasy romance, Three Thousand Years of Longing, describing it as the “anti-Mad Max” movie. While Miller most recently exploded onto big screens everywhere with the dialogue-light, white-knuckle action extravaganza that is Mad Max: Fury Road, the filmmaker has revealed to Deadline how different Three Thousand Years of Longing is to the post-apocalyptic franchise.

“Well, it’s certainly a palate-cleanser for Fury Road. And there was a lot of pressure to go straight into another [Mad Max movie]. In a way, things got chaotic with the studio going through changes of regimes, and I knew I really wanted to make this film regardless.”

Continuing, Miller explained what he means by the movie being the “anti-Mad Max,” with Three Thousand Years of Longing swapping heart-pounding action sequences for what will surely be an equally heart-pounding...conversation. That's right, the fantasy movie will center almost solely on a single conversation between two characters, Tilda Swinton’s scholar and Idria Elba’s Djinn.

“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.”

Three Thousand Years of Longing Sounds Like a Far Cry from Miller’s Mad Max Mania

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United Artists Releasing

While Mad Max: Fury Road focused almost entirely on a high-speed chase across the desert, Three Thousand Years of Longing will put the spotlight on a spirited chat. Written and directed by George Miller, Three Thousand Years of Longing has been described as an “epic, fantasy romance,” and follows a lonely British woman and scholar who is content with life.

She encounters a Djinn while on vacation in Istanbul, who offers her three wishes in exchange for his freedom. This presents a problem, as she is a scholar of narrative and knows all the cautionary tales about wishes gone wrong. He pleads his case by telling her fantastical stories of his past. Their conversation, the entirety of which takes place in a hotel room, leads to consequences neither would have expected.

It’s easy to see what Miller means when calling Three Thousand Years of Longing the anti-Mad Max, with a much smaller scale, in both cast and landscape, sure to create something far more intimate. But likely no less exciting. Starring Idris Elba, Tilda Swinton, Aamito Lagum, Burcu Gölgedar, and Matteo Bocelli, Three Thousand Years of Longing is due to premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

Now that he has finished making a movie that is the antithesis of Mad Max, George Miller will do a complete about-turn, returning to the beloved franchise with the prequel, Furiosa, which promises to be more epic in scale than any Mad Max movie before it.