BBC Doctor Who movie soon

29 November 2011

John Howell

The BBC and Harry Potter Director David Yates are working on a big screen Doctor Who movie. Yates directed the last four Harry Potter movies, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and the superior Part 2.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Yates said he is working on the Doctor Who movie with Jane Tranter, head of L.A. based BBC Worldwide Productions.

"We're looking at writers now,” he said. “We're going to spend two to three years to get it right. It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena."

"The notion of the time-travelling Time Lord is such a strong one, because you can express story and drama in any dimension or time," he added.

Yates said the movie’s plot would not follow the TV series, but would take a completely fresh approach.

"Russell T. Davies and then Steven Moffat have done their own transformations, which were fantastic, but we have to put that aside and start from scratch."

They are looking for writers in the US and UK.

The patchy but frequently brilliant time travel series starring the eccentric Time Lord, “The Doctor”, was broadcast from 1963 to 1989 and then restarted by the BBC in 2005 with Torchwood writer Russell T. Davies. Season 6, under the guidance of head writer Steven Moffat, has just ended. Matt Smith is the current Doctor (the 11th actor to take on the role).

We’ve had two Doctor Who films previously, both of them quite bad. Doctor Who and the Daleks in 1965 and Doctor Who: Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. in 1966. Peter Cushing starred in both.

The important unanswered question of course is who will play The Doctor in a big screen film version? Brad Pitt? George Cooley? Daniel Craig? Who knows!

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