Watch an exclusive clip from George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing

Of all the things writer-director George Miller has been called over the past 40-plus years of his career, “predictable” isn’t on the list. It’s frequently hard to reconcile the fact that the same man who made the gleefully violent Mad Max movies — including 2015’s beloved action extravaganza Mad Max Fury Road — Also directed animated dancing penguin movies Happy Feet Happy Feet 2The sequel to the bizarre family-movie, Baby, Pig in the CityJohn Updike, literary adaptation Eastwick WitchesThe Oscar-nominated drama about historical dramas Lorenzo’s Oil.

While these films range wildly in tone and focus, it may be easiest to take them all as the same body of work by considering that they’re all essentially fables. Some are aimed more at children and some more at adults, but in all cases, Miller’s stories are about mythic quests and the people using those quests to figure themselves out.

This is his latest film. Three Thousand years of longingThis is because it’s more obvious than others that myth is. In a tale adapted from A.S. Byatt’s 1994 short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” modern-day scholar Alithea (Tilda Swinton) accidentally frees a bottled djinn (Idris Elba), who regales her with three millennia of his adventures, loves, and losses. Contrary to the practical and restrained excess of Fury Road, Three Thousand years of longing This CG adventure is full of wistful fairy tale stories, strange fantasy creatures and voluptuous settings.

This exclusive video shows Alithea, who is completely unprepared, getting her first look at the Djinn. She has some difficulty adapting to 21st century hotel rooms.

The scene is a very literal translation of Byatt’s words in the story, apart from Alithea’s name change:

The bottle was in her hand when she felt a quick swarming. She exhaled, and a dark, fast-moving stain emerged from the bottle. It made a loud buzzing sound, smelled like woodsmoke, cinnamon, sulphur and something that could have been incense. It gathered, turned, and flew away from Dr. Perholt in a huge paisley. I am seeing things, thought Dr. Perholt, following, and found she could not follow, for the bathroom door was blocked by what she slowly made out to be an enormous foot, a foot with five toes as high as she was, surmounted by yellow horny toenails, a foot incased in skin that was olive-coloured, laced with gold, like snakeskin, not scaly but somehow mailed…

The shape of the foot changed. It grew initially, then began to shrink. Gillian thought that it was safer not trying to squeeze around it. Gillian could now follow the example of Gillian by drawing it back.

Miller prudently leaves out the part Byatt goes on to describe, about how the massive djinn, folded uncomfortably into her room, is wearing a short robe that doesn’t cover his genitals. Or how, as he shrinks down a bit at a time to fit on her bed, he leaves his junk until the last, so at one point he’s “almost hidden behind the mound of his private parts, which he then shrank and tucked away. It was almost a form of boasting.” Now that’s mythic.

Three Thousand years of longingThe film will open in cinemas Aug. 26.