You

know, this film is an examination of storytelling that concerns itself in a sense with the overlapping between Western and Middle Eastern traditions in particular. It's no accident that it's framed by this encounter between a woman and a gin in an Istanbul hotel room. But I was wondering, for you as a Greek Australian, I wonder if in some way this film was perhaps your way of reflecting on your personal roots, culturally Did you feel a personal attachment, particularly to this story and the particular cultural reference points?

Well, not consciously, except the thing... Well, first of all, my mother was born in Turkey, a Greek family, just over a century ago. During the Armenian genocide, they left, eventually she came as an infant to Australia in the early 20th century. So there was some resonance there. But the one thing I noticed that when I was with my family in Greece on the island where my father came from, was just how storytelling was so significant that the histories, family histories and all the almost fables that that were told. I think it happens in every culture but it's more likely to happen in older cultures. Probably we have the most vital and extraordinary example of that in the First Nations culture of Australia, where arguably a lot of the narratives go back at least 40,000 years and some would argue 75,000 years. And it's a way that we seem to, as humans, negotiate life and its meaning and our existence. It explains everything around us in a way that is useful. And we talk about that in the story. So I think you have a point that perhaps, of at least some of that heritage, that I might've been more acutely aware to the potential of the story like this. You're

listening to the screen show. My name's Jason De Rosso, and it is my absolute pleasure to be in conversation with the Australian filmmaker George Miller, whose new film is 3000 years of longing starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. George, watching this film, Fellini's eight and a half popped into my mind of all things, because Tilda Swinton's character is this narratologist, I think is the term, and she knows so much about story. She's an academic who studies story but has this, become rather detached and has quite a rational relationship to stories I think as you would if it's what you do every day. And I'd almost say it's she has an almost joyless relationship to story and this film is about her rediscovering that joy but it did make me think of the kind of filmmaker in crisis moment that's depicted in a film like Eight and a Half and certainly maybe a crisis in a novelist's life. That crisis you have as a storyteller where perhaps you've lost that joy. And well, I was wondering, is there a danger in dealing with story all the time that you kind of lose that joy? And is there a semi-autobiographical element in this film do you think? Are you in some way representing if not yourself a kind of fear of what you might become until the Swinton's character, you know that fear of being joyless?

Well in all this time I've known this story it hadn't occurred to me but I think there's some accuracy in what you're saying. Certainly identified very much with the character. I certainly identified with the notion of storytelling in the way that she deals with it, in the way that the Jin and she communicate only by story. She makes the comment that stories to Jin are like breast to them. So that's something I had. You know, when I first started making films, some people said to me, George, film is an art. You should give yourself over to the intuition more. You tend to overthink things. And it worried me because I thought, wait a minute, maybe being too analytical and so on? And then I realized that's impossible because you're driven by intuition in we as humans, almost in everything we do. What makes the intuition muscular is actually the preparation and the process of being analytical and really, really probing every aspect of what you're doing. And I found that in the best artists, certainly in the best actors, the actors that I really, really have enjoyed working with the most and sit back and watch as we're making the film and almost in wonder, are those that go through a process of working a role, approaching it from every single angle, not necessarily performing, doing talking work, walking work. You know, that concern that you can overthink something. Let me fairly quickly, because it's almost impossible to override the intuition. Basically, most of what we do is ultimately intuitive. But going back to being autobiographical, as Alathea says, you know, I find feelings through stories. And I think in many ways we do, but ultimately she realizes, I think that what we all realize is through your own experience, measured against the cultural information that you picked up in your life as you go through, and you measuring your own experience against that is where life is more fully lived, I think, if that makes any sense. And I think that's what happens to Alathea. It's only when she becomes part of her own story that she feels more complete as a person. I'm interested

in you co-writing this adaptation with Augusta Gore, your daughter, because it's a very female-focused story in a way or set of stories. When the jinn starts telling his stories to Tilda Swinton's character, we go back through, well, essentially there are three main stories of three women that he falls in love with, really. And this is the wonderful tension of the immortal who falls in love with the mortal and you know it's very classic and he embodies that inner unease and turmoil so well I think in a very wonderful performance. But what do these three women represent? What do you think unifies them as entities within this broader narrative that you've woven? Well,

first of all, I think A.S. White, when she wrote it in the 90s, if you read the novella, she was very much about the place of women in narrative throughout time. I mean, she's very broad in her scope. And that's one thing that resonated with me. I, I, I grew up in a family with, with three brothers. I went to all male schools all my life. I went to medical school at a time when only 30% of the students were female. And so I was very much in a male culture. And then, but I did have a really magnificent mother. And then when I had a daughter as a first born, and with my partner now, I, my life shifted, I guess, to try into understanding the world a little bit more. And I think that was even reflected in Fury Road, which, and I think that's probably why I was attracted to AS Byatt's worldview. And I think the stories are more powerful when you're dealing with stories about love, particularly at kind of across time across 3000 years, and you have a gym, who is driven by, by his emotions and so on. I just think it was, it naturally fell into that. The reason why Gussie, Gussie began writing it together was I had worked with Nick Enright many years before. We had such a wonderful time. And we were looking towards working on something when he... said, would you like to work on this? And as it was, he ended up with a melanoma and his time was limited. And he happens to be Gussie's godfather. And he said to me, you know, if I can't write it, why don't you ask Gussie because she's got all the things that will complement the way you see the work. And he was right. Both of them are actors. Nick was one of those people who, you know, he's a multitasker, he was a director, writer, playwright, teacher and so on. So he identified that in Gussie, and that proved to be the case. The other thing about it was we could write it over a long period of time. There was no deadline, as it were. So I was making other films, she was doing other things. We'd come back to it, we'd give it a go, we'd put it aside. And that gave us the time to explore the thing. I hope that answers your question.

It does. It does. I began this interview asking you about why the stars aligned, you know, for this project. in this interview, and that is that, do you think that this story about storytelling now comes at a particularly interesting and important time for us globally, given what we've been through in the last two years? I guess there's been the pandemic where many of us have spent a lot of time at home watching stories on screens or reading books. So storytelling has been something of a consolation. On the other hand, we're in an era where I think there's a particular focus on political figures in particular, demagogues and the way that they tell stories to influence large swathes of people. And you can insert whichever politician or world leader that you want. Oh, and I have to mention, it in the film as well as a brief moment where you sort of talk. This reference made to the claim that superheroes of the new sort of Greek gods and I'm very skeptical about that I hear that around the trap some very skeptical so. All of those things in mind how do you think this film lands in the culture at the moment where I think storytelling is something we're interested in analysing again.

I don't think it's new, the analysis of story of course, but we stories are very potent because a they're accessible and as many people say or have said the quickest way to truth is story as opposed to, you know, we're in a world that's overwhelmed by data. Data has to be organized into knowledge and that knowledge has to be organized in some form of wisdom. It has to be orchestrated in some way. So you're more likely to get something more resonant, something more poetic through a story. It's always been the case. I mean, you know, it's, it's no accident that ever since people recorded stories, people have told stories as if the characters were animals, you know, I've been responsible for that sort of behavior as well, you know, talking pigs, dancing penguins and so on. It caused their allegorical. And through allegory, you invite the, the, the audience, the beholder of the story to interpret it according to their worldview. However, I believe that short story should be labelled with warnings that they are indeed health hazards. If you tell the wrong narrative, you can end up following cults and demagogues. You can push people's biases one way or another. So they're not something that you can tell casually and just with a free, if you like, artistic spirit. You have to be aware of the responsibilities within the stories, particularly if you're telling stories like the ones I'm brought to, which in fact are quite kinetic and like the Mad Max films, violent. And corporeal

as well I think, they're very corporeal. Your films have a lot of bodily stuff in them, we feel them viscerally and we see lots of body shapes and things happen to bodies and there's beauty and there's grotesque. So that's also very, that connects you as a viewer I think.

So I think the stories which tend to endure are those that in which there's more to them than meets the eye that there's a lot of as I like to say a lot of iceberg under the tip. You don't know which ones are going to resonate as storytellers. You put them out there and they're in some way the zeitgeist responds or not. But there's always something inside those stories. There's something always in those stories that resonate with the time. And I think that's why, you know, that's why I dare say I still have a joy in the process, as you could, unlike our theia. I think somehow am drawn by an intense curiosity as to how to tell stories and more importantly, why it is we're telling them.

Well, maybe in fact if I did mention the semi-autobiographical possibility before maybe this is that semi-autobiographical element is in the gin and not actually in Alithair. I

think it's both. I have to say I think it's both. The two parts. I

take on board everything you said about stories and all that, but there are moments, there are moments in your film, in your films where sometimes I think some beautiful moments in your films are extra narrative. They're just a beautiful shot. There's something very abstract. Even the shot of the baggage trolley at the floor level in the airport scene early on in this film, I thought this is the sort of shot that a film student might try and pull off and it'd look clunky and would sit awkwardly in a sequence and you managed to pull it off. It's just, you know, and these aren't, they don't have a narrative value necessarily, but they want, you know, they're wonderful all the same. Well,

I appreciate that. It's, you know, it just seems, it seems that it would slot in at the time, like a piece of joinery, that the pieces fit. I think, you know, film is a mosaic art.