“The moment I turned the last page, it just stuck in my mind and wouldn’t let go, which is the way it goes with the stories that, they gestate in the back of your mind. There are stories within stories, a little like One Thousand and One Nights” says Miller. “It felt unique, something that you couldn’t quite fit into any genre and it ticked one very important box – there must be a whole lot more to it than meets the eye. Byatt’s 1994 short story ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ in the late 1990s. Once read it stayed with me, as some stories tend to do…then, one day it occurred to me that it should be a film,” says Miller, who first encountered Alithea and the Djinn when he read British author A.S.
“It’s a story that seemed to probe many of the mysteries and paradoxes of life, and so succinctly. Byatt, that was sparked when Miller’s production company, Kennedy Miller Mitchell, bought the rights to the story in the late 1990s. Acclaimed Australian auteur George Miller, who has been responsible for everything from Happy Feet to Mad Max: Fury Road, directed and co-wrote the screenplay of Three Thousand Years Of Longing, a long-in-development adaptation of The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, a short story collection by A.S.
