'This has been a whirlwind romance,’ smiles Tilda Swinton, talking about her latest collaborator George Miller. Well, ‘whirlwind’ in Swinton terms; the iconic flame-haired Scottish actress is known for cultivating working relationships with directors over decades (I Am Love’s Luca Guadagnino; Memoria’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul). Here, she met the Australian filmmaker behind Babe and the Mad Max films five years ago at the Cannes Film Festival. He immediately sensed she was perfect to play the lead in his new film, the modern-day fairytale 3000 Years Of Longing. 

Based on AS Byatt’s 1994 short story, ‘The Djinn In The Nightingale’s Eye’, Swinton plays Dr Alithea Binnie, a lonely narratologist who is in Istanbul for a lecture. She buys a small trinket in a bazaar, and when rubbing it clean, out pops a pointy-eared djinn (Idris Elba) offering her three wishes. But rather than take him up on bringing her what her heart desires, Alithea sits in her hotel room and listens to his remarkable, centuries-spanning story of love and incarceration. 

Swinton found the script ‘intriguing’, although it was Miller’s mind she clearly wanted to explore. ‘Really I wanted to make it with him,’ she says. ‘The mysterious thing for me was how those two tones [reality and fantasy] were going to co-exist. And we had early conversations about that, which really hooked me in, about the fact that they wouldn’t! We would keep coming back like a boomerang, like a big bungee backwards, into the hotel room. It was very, very intimate and in many ways mundane . . . the situation very mundane, almost banal.’

Still, you can see just how this might suit Swinton, an actress who has been experimenting with directors ever since she teamed up with Derek Jarman on films like Caravaggio and Edward II. Here, she compares it to Japanese animation. ‘This is meant as the highest compliment: it felt like we were making a live action Miyazaki Hayao,’ she says, referring to the director of Spirited Away. ‘It felt like it was very slightly animated, the whole thing. So it wasn’t grainy in that sense, but we knew that we had to fill these rather shapely chocolates with soft centres. And so it had to have a down-to-earth quality.’

While 3000 Years . . . is enlivened by Miller’s thrilling visuals and storytelling elan, there is a deeper layer. Swinton, who will next be seen in Wes Anderson’s Spanish-shot Asteroid City and Joanna Hogg’s ghost story The Eternal Daughter, notes how the film demonstrates just how important narrative is to us, something the pandemic rammed home. ‘We saw everybody across the planet missing cinema, really missing it. Not even the cine-geeks like us, but everybody just feeling deprived. And realising our dependence on other people’s narratives, not just our own. These narratives, they’re really important to us. Fiction is really useful, because it gives us a sense of perspective. And it also gives us a break from ourselves.’

3000 Years Of Longing is in cinemas now.