Film about a genie starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton is partly true, says director at Cannes

The director George Miller and actors Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba at a photocall in Cannes for the film Three Thousand Years of Longing. Photograph: Eric Gaillard/Reuters

A lonely, real-life experience in an Istanbul hotel room – an imagined moment of escapist magic – inspired the British author AS Byatt to write a romantic fantasy about a genie in a bottle, George Miller has revealed after the Cannes premiere of his big-screen version.

When the filmmaker, best known for directing the Mad Max franchise, first visited Byatt to ask for permission to make a film of her short story, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, she told him that much of the background detail in it was true.