It's full steam ahead on the second reboot of The Terminator franchise, with Emilia Clarke, Jason Clarke and Jai Courtney set to join Arnold Schwarzenegger for Terminator: Genesis. Alan Taylor, who helmed Thor: The Dark World, is directing.

Schwarzenegger himself has been chatting about the film at a special Arnold Sports Festival event that took place the other day, which in turn was picked up via the website The Arnold Fans.

He confirmed that production was set to start "in the middle or in the end of April", and that "it will be a four or four-and-a-half month shoot". It was already known that most of the film would be shot in New Orleans, but Schwarzenegger added that some was potentially going to be done in Los Angeles too.

He added that I'm really looking forward to that because as you know, the last time when they did the Terminator, it was when I was Governor and so I couldn't be in that movie but now I'm back again and they are very excited about having me in the film", adding that "the script is fantastic so I'm really looking forward to this film".

Terminator:  Genesis is set for release on July 1st 2015.

The Arnold Fans.

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Few films have caused as much debate on the pages of this site over the past year or two as the rebooted RoboCop. We liked it, some didn't, some thought we went on about it a lot, some thought we didn't talk about it enough. It's for conundrums such as these that the fine beverage known as coffee was invented.

Anyway: in spite of a middling to not-so-middling performance at the US box office, it seems as though the new RoboCop may just be on its way to being a modest hit. Given that it was little secret there were plans for more RoboCop movies, we wonder - when the monies from the film's eventual home releases are counted up - that - if it might just have done enough business to make that happen.

RoboCop currently stands at $51m in the US, and it's not expected to get to $70m. But outside of America, the film has pulled in over $130m, in particular buoyed by a strong take in China. The movie's been a hit in the UK too.

In much the say way that last year's Pacific Rim eventually hit courtesy of its non-US take, RoboCop - on a smaller scale - may be going the same way.

Also at the box office over the weekend incidentally, Frozen become the second animated film to ever take over $1bn worldwide. Yikes.

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Roald Dahl has often been referred to as one of the greatest storytellers for children in the 20th century. His books have delighted children for generations, with their dark and inventive sense of humour and their eccentric, dastardly adult characters.

Likewise, his written work for adults has just as much wit and creativity, and over the years, he also worked as a screenwriter on a number of projects, including TV work on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and his own anthology series, Roald Dahl's Tales Of The Unexpected.

Given how it doesn't even take the likes of J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer five years to have their popular works adapted by Hollywood, there has inevitably been an extensive crossover between Dahl's written work and the big screen. His work has been adapted by filmmakers as diverse as Nicolas Roeg, Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton and Danny DeVito.

Up until his death in 1990, Dahl brought several of his own projects to the big screen, and saw some adapted by others. In this article, we'll look back at his cinematic pursuits as a screenwriter, the project that put him off having his own children's books, and the screen versions of his books that have been made since.

Early screenplays

People sometimes forget that Dahl had credits as a screenwriter on several movies. We wrote about his first screen project, The Gremlins, which would have been a wartime adventure about mythical creatures who sabotaged planes, in our article about unproduced Disney projects. In short, the studio pulled the plug, due to the interference of the British Air Ministry in a feature that became too obviously propagandistic.

Some time after, in the 1960s, he had another abortive film project, tentatively titled The Bells Of Hell Go Ding-A-Ling-A-Ling, which was cancelled 10 weeks into shooting. However, it was through this script that Dahl found more success as a screenwriter, on Sean Connery's fifth Bond film, You Only Live Twice, based on the character created by his friend Ian Fleming.

“It was Ian Fleming's worst book, with no plot in it which would even make a movie”, he noted. Dahl was given free rein to make up the script from characters from the book and his own ideas, so we can credit him with the rocket-ship that swallows other spacecraft in its nose, and the mini-helicopter Little Nellie, but also the sequence in which Sean Connery is valmorphanised into a Japanese man, Team America-style.

On more fantastical ground, Dahl adapted another Fleming book for the screen a year later - the only story the Bond author ever wrote for children, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was co-written with Ken Hughes, with songs from Robert and Richard Sherman, but Dahl's involvement is one of those things that just makes sense the second you realise that the Child Catcher was one of his creations.

In 1971, he adapted Joy Cowley's novel Nest In A Fallen Tree to make the The Road Builder (released in the United States as The Night Digger), an altogether more grown-up affair than either of his previous screen projects. His then-wife Patricia Neal starred in the lead role, as a middle-aged woman who falls for an attractive young handyman, at the height of paranoia about a serial killer on the loose in the local area.

Dahl would wind up developing a fierce animosity with composer Bernard Hermann, who wound up getting far more creative control than seemed reasonable, from producers who were desperate to secure his services. He had intended the film as a showcase for Neal, who was hoping for a comeback after a series of debilitating strokes, and he ended up disowning the film upon release.

As it turned out, it wouldn't be the only film he wanted to take his name off, that year. Dahl had adapted his own 1964 novel Charlie And The Chocolate Factory into screenplay format for Paramount Pictures, but he was unhappy when later rewrites by David Seltzer placed greater focus on Willy Wonka than on Charlie. Even the title changed, from Charlie, to Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory.

Dahl didn't like Gene Wilder in that title role either. His Wonka wishlist had included Spike Milligan, Ron Moody and Jon Pertwee, but the studio didn't want Milligan, and the other two both turned the role down due to work commitments.

But generations of children have enjoyed Seltzer and Wilder's take just fine, with its classic soundtrack and timeless appeal. It's interesting that Pertwee was one of Dahl's choices, because while he turned down the lead role in order to play the Third Doctor, Wilder's performance is roughly proportionate to the best Doctor Who we never had.

The following year, Dahl published a sequel novel, Charlie And The Great Glass Elevator, and later made a start on a third instalment called Charlie And The White House, but never finished it. He was so disappointed with the original film, he never gave up the rights to make a film version, and it wasn't until long after his death that his second wife, Felicity Dahl, would entertain the prospect of another movie based on Charlie's adventures.

The 1990s - Adaptations

Perhaps his disappointment in Willy Wonka explains why there weren't any more attempts to adapt his children's stories for the big screen until almost two decades later.

The BFG and Danny The Champion Of The World were adapted for TV in 1989, the former as a Cosgrove Hill animation that led ITV's Christmas Day schedule, and has gone on to delight audiences on VHS and DVD over the years, and the latter as a TV movie starring Jeremy Irons and Robbie Coltrane, which was said to be Dahl's favourite adaptation of his own work.

In 1990, Don't Look Now director Nicolas Roeg teamed up with Jim Henson to adapt Dahl's 1983 novel The Witches, and the result mixed the best sensibilities of both - it's a handsome and frightening horror movie that was aimed squarely at kids.

For the most part, the material suits Roeg's style down to the ground, and the child-hating witches are brought to life, led by Anjelica Huston, with disturbing gusto. It would also prove to be the last film that Henson worked on before he died, and his creature workshop effects are marvellous, as ever. However, Dahl loathed this film version too, specifically because having shot his original, bittersweet ending, the studio opted for a happier resolution (Henson would ultimately side with the studio on this one).

In the book, our young hero is permanently transformed into a mouse, but after exterminating all of the witches in Britain at their annual conference with the same trick, he and his grandmother resolve to travel the world, killing every witch they can find by turning them into mice. Moreover, the grandmother tells the boy that he will probably only live as long as she will, but he's cool with that.

In the film, the Grand High Witch's assistant shows up to turn young Luke back into a boy, for a more upbeat ending. The author was shown both endings back to back, and loathed the happier conclusion so much that he demanded to have his name taken off the project.

It would be a few years after the author passed away in 1990, before the next adaptation of one of his books for children, but before that, 1995's Four Rooms made for an intriguing use of some of his short stories for adults. Four Rooms featured four shorts, directed by Allison Anders, Robert Rodriguez, Alexandre Rockwell and Quentin Tarantino, in the form of an anthology film.

The film was very poorly received, and is still probably the least regarded thing that Tarantino has ever been associated with, a problem that might well have been alleviated if he hadn't insisted on acting in it. On the other hand, the most complimentary reviews went to Rodriguez's segment, “Room 309”, based on Dahl's The Misbehavers, in which Tim Roth's Ted is paid $500 to babysit two kids, who then proceed to demolish the titular hotel room.

The following year brought two more adaptations of Dahl's children's novels - Henry Selick's James & The Giant Peach and Danny DeVito's Matilda. Selick generally did fairly well in translating the nastier humour of Dahl's book, casting Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes and Joanna Lumley as James' horrid aunts in the live-action sequences, before burrowing into that big squishy stop-motion fruit, and setting up a whole bunch of vivid insect characters.

It's a little more surprising that Danny DeVito totally nailed Matilda, despite a bunch of changes to the source material that might ostensibly have appeared to be signs of trouble. The plot is transplanted to suburban America, which actually turns out to be the perfect setting for young, inquisitive Matilda Wormwood to strive against close-minded monotony.

Mara Wilson is perfectly cast in the lead role, and Pam Ferris gives one of the most iconic villain performances of the 90s as Miss Trunchbull, the barking mad former Olympian who takes to terrorising students, hammer-throwing girls by their pigtails and force-feeding an entire chocolate cake to greedy Bruce Bogtrotter, with all of the insane glee of Dahl's original character.

The book is essentially a primary school Carrie, and DeVito carries that off wonderfully on screen. It's a little weird that he plays both the sympathetic narrator, and the slimy Mr. Wormwood, especially when his dialogue comes directly after his narration. But this is never anywhere close to becoming a vanity project, and he has a knack for wry humour that serves as well as previous directorial efforts like Throw Momma From The Train and The War Of The Roses.

Matilda is arguably the best big screen adaptation of a Roald Dahl story to date, in which all of the adaptations serve to actually enhance the point of the story, and nobody is shying away from the sheer repugnance of the majority of the adult characters. It's not to say that those who later took on Dahl's work missed the point in some way, but nobody has yet done it as well as DeVito.

The 2000s - Auteurs

Danny DeVito is a fine director, but you wouldn't exactly call him an auteur. Without wishing to get into authorship theory, (just sing “Everything is authored” to the tune of Tegan and Sara's earworm so we can all save some time) the last decade of Dahl adaptations has been somewhat characterised by directors who have really brought their idiosyncrasies to bear on the material, with any involvement from the late author having been quite firmly precluded.

Interestingly enough, a number of different directors were attached to a new version of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, including Rob Minkoff (The Lion King), Gary Ross (Pleasantville), Tom Shadyac (Bruce Almighty), and even Martin Scorsese. In the end, it was Tim Burton who brought Willy Wonka back to the screen for Warner Bros, who made a killing on home video and TV screenings when they acquired the rights to the Mel Stuart film back in the 80s.

2005's Charlie And The Chocolate Factory is arguably Burton's second strike-out in terms of remakes, after 2001's Planet Of The Apes. It's one of the few films in which you could argue that it's more a re-adaptation of the book, because it's entirely different from the iconic 1971 version, and more faithful to the book, but it's still more a Burton film than a Dahl one.

Johnny Depp's performance as Willy Wonka really seems to miss the point - the film undoes all of its good work in sticking with the book by inventing a rubbish backstory for Wonka and his dad, just to contextualise Depp's choice to play the role as a man-child, rather than the wily loner that Wilder personified. It's lazy to compare his portrayal to a certain late singer, because that's not the reason why it's bad.

In a stab at timelessness, the film seems to take place in some bizarro transatlantic realm, which is ostensibly British, but for the use of dollars as currency and Wonka's accent. In fairness, the film does focus more on Charlie, and gets aspects like the Bucket family and the Oompa Loompas bang-on. Furthermore, Danny Elfman distinguishes the musical style of the film from the version we all know, with an eclectic range of genres that take lyrics direct from the novel's Oompa Loompa songs.

All in all, this is one of those films that shows why Burton's style is easier to swallow when he tells an original story, or something you haven't seen before, rather than remaking or re-imagining other properties. His influence was measurable in Selick's James And The Giant Peach, which he produced, but that feels a world away from his hands-on adaptation here.

Personally speaking, I'm apparently in the minority for having the same issues with Wes Anderson's 2009 film of Fantastic Mr. Fox, a film I really took against when I saw it in the cinema. In principle, Anderson gets the mischievous side of the characters down pat, but this one felt overwhelmed by his style.

Where a studio like Aardman would probably have made a brilliant stop-motion version of Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson veers off into non-sequiturs with existentialism and Jarvis Cocker (who I've never liked less than in this film) that I've yet to be convinced would appeal to kids. It's still beautifully animated, and the voice cast are marvellous as a matter of course, but something about it just doesn't quite click.

I'm very aware that most other people feel differently, and I haven't revisited the film since I rewatched it on DVD back in 2009, so feel free to defend the film in the comments.

The future?

Brilliant news! The next Roald Dahl adaptation we'll see on our screens will be Esio Trot, starring Dustin Hoffman as Mr. Hoppy and Judi Dench as Miss Silver. The wonderfully eccentric book, in which Mr. Hoppy woos his downstairs neighbour with a magic tortoise-growing scam, will be adapted by Richard Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer for BBC One. We'd bet on it being one of the big attractions in the BBC's Christmas schedule.

Over in Hollywood, it's been a bit quiet on the Dahl front for some time now. Paramount apparently has the rights to a feature version of The BFG, but the last we heard, Felicity Dahl told The Telegraph in 2006 that they were stuck on finding a screenwriter and a star. Elsewhere, Guillermo del Toro has expressed interest in remaking The Witches, which we'd love to see, but suspect that it's somewhere on a very long waiting list of projects that the infectiously enthusiastic director has announced over the last five years.

In terms of our own personal wishlist, it's baffling to think that nobody has made a movie of The Twits starring Brian Blessed and Miriam Margolyes - from the Quentin Blake illustrations alone, they'd be perfect casting. We'd also be intrigued to see what a studio like Magic Light Pictures could do with The Enormous Crocodile, in the wake of their animated shorts based on The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo's Child.

In Conclusion

A survey published in The Telegraph last year showed that fantasy novels like Harry Potter and Twilight had overtaken Dahl's books in the top 10 most popular books amongst children, which seems like a terrible shame. But the works of Rowling and Meyer both gained traction in the library first, before moving into the cinema.

Having created a wealth of stories that have been enjoyed both on page and screen, here's hoping that any future screen adaptations of these books serve to revive young readers' interest in the wonderful world of Roald Dahl, and bring his stories to a new generation.

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NB: While the below is spoiler-free, do avoid reading further if you’d prefer to see the final film absolutely cold.

Showing off 20 minutes of your forthcoming summer movie before it's even finished could, in theory, be a risky move. Yet Warner Bros and Legendary clearly have confidence in director Gareth Edwards' forthcoming Godzilla, and when we'd finished seeing some snippets of footage from his monster movie reboot, we were also confident that the full film will be worthy of the creature's status as cinema's King of the Monsters.

With our excitement suitably piqued by the footage (and you can read our spoiler-free thoughts on that here), Edwards took to the stage with presenter Edith Bowman to talk about Godzilla in an illuminating Q&A. Here's what the director had to say about  designing a new Godzilla, migrating to high-budget filmmaking, and lots more.

1. Gareth Edwards' friends refer to his blockbuster project as Godzooky

When asked whether he was a fan of Godzilla as a youth, Edwards mentioned Hannah-Barbera's 1970s/80s cartoon based on the character, which saw the iconic kaiju joined by his 'cousin' Godzooky - a diminutive comedy sidekick with feeble wings who served as the show's hapless Scrappy-Doo.

Thanks, perhaps, to its infuriatingly catchy theme tune, the Godzilla show is still mentioned from time to time - and Godzooky is, the director reveals, what his friends call his current work in progress. "[I watched] the Hanna-Barbera cartoon when I was really little, with Godzooky," Edwards said. "That's the comedy go-to joke for all my friends about the film I'm making. They always call it Godzooky."

Edwards was later introduced to the Toho Godzilla movies as a teenager, when Channel 4 screened them on UK television in the 80s and early 90s. "After that, I remember Channel 4 used to show some of the Showa-era Godzilla movies on a Friday night," Edwards said. "For a while, as a kid, I couldn't understand that they'd dubbed these things. I thought it was just really bad audio. I thought, 'Why can't they get this right?' And then a bit later I realised that the Japanese make films in Japanese."

As you've probably gathered by now, this year's Godzilla will be more closely modelled on the serious and quite bleak tone of Ishiro Honda's 1954 original rather than the more outlandishly fun sequels which followed - or, for that matter, Roland Emmerich's egg-laying 1998 incarnation.

"I was a lot older when the BFI released a version of the 1954 [Godzilla]," Edwards said, "and I bought it and watched it, and realised how serious and good that version is. It's a metaphor for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, basically, and a serious take on a monster movie - which is what we wanted to do for this."

2. The challenges of telling a good story remain unaffected by budgets

Made for a six figure sum, Gareth Edwards' debut feature Monsters earned considerable acclaim, and set him on the path that would ultimately lead to his Godzilla gig. The obvious question, then, is how do you go from directing a low-budget film with a tiny cast and crew to a multi-million-dollar epic? The answer is simple, Edwards told us: technical concerns aside, the challenge of telling a good story remains the same, irrespective of budget.

"If you wrote a list of all the pros and cons of making a low-budget movie, and then you're making a high-budget movie, just swap them over," the director explained. "Everything that is easy to do when there's just three of you is really hard when there's 400 of you, and everything's that's really hard to do when you've only got £10 is really easy when you've got millions. And so that balances back out again.

"But the real difficulty, that is full stop the hardest thing in any filmmaking process, is to try and tell a gripping story where you care about the outcome. That doesn't matter if you have 10p or $200m, it's just as hard for everybody. And that's what we've focused all our time on, and tried to get right."

3. The story focuses on one family affected by Godzilla's fury

Everything we've seen from Godzilla hints at a huge story taking place over multiple locations, but the widescreen destruction and global catastrophe will be anchored by a relatively small group of characters. "At the heart of it, we have a family that gets torn apart by a tragedy 15 years ago, which was apparently caused by a natural disaster," Edwards explains.

That family's a particularly starry one: there's Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche as husband and wife Joe and Sandra Brody (who, by-the-by, happen to be nuclear scientists), and their son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who's a lieutenant in the US army. Ford, in turn, has a wife, Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and a young son, Sam (Carson Bolde). Although precise plot details are shrouded in mystery, it's clear from the trailers that each character will be directly affected by Godzilla's campaign of destruction.

4. The new Godzilla will have a humanity-versus-nature theme

The original Godzilla emerged from a nation still bearing the painful psychological scars left by the end of the Second World War, and as Edwards himself pointed out, the iconic kaiju is a walking embodiment of destruction and suffering. With the 1954 film carrying that much emotional weight, how could a modern, American movie possibly do it justice? That was something, Edwards said, that was considered at length before a page of script was written.

"I think that's one of the reasons Godzilla's lasted so long, because apart from having Godzilla in the film, you have an infinite canvas," Edwards explained. "It's not like other franchises or characters, where it's very much about a particular story you have to tell over and over. With Godzilla, you can kind of do anything you want. That was a bit paralysing to start with, because what are you going to do? We have this amazing opportunity, so what do we do? We brainstormed it for ages, and circled around a million ideas.

"It took a good year, if not a year and a half, to land on the story that felt right to everybody. And what's at the heart of our movie, which I think is at the heart of the original, is the idea of man versus nature. That if you mess with nature, you're going to lose. For a long time we've thought of ourselves as the alpha predator of the planet, that we can do what we want.

"Godzilla takes the assumption that we're not the alpha predator. What if there's something else? With the nuclear age in the original, we embrace that theme in this, that there's a Pandora's box, which can be used to our advantage or disadvantage. Godzilla's putting nature back in balance."

5. Godzilla's design took approximately one year

While Edwards and his team mulled over the story possibilities, there was also the design of the mighty Godzilla himself to consider. He's beloved character who's gradually evolved over a succession of movies at Toho, and any redesign would have to respect the character's 60-year heritage.

"I thought it was going to be a really simple task to design Godzilla," Edwards said. "He's already designed - you just copy him, right? But it took a year, the process of getting him right. It was kind of like when you witness a crime, and the police say, 'Well, what did he look like?' And you go, 'Well, he had this...' and you'd try to draw it, but you realise you can't. It was just this trial-and-error thing. WETA in New Zealand did the design for a lot of Godzilla, and it was a back-and-forth thing until we could rotate him from every angle, and look at every little bit. I'm really proud of the way he turned out."

Although we only saw Godzilla in brief, dust-shrouded glimpses in the footage, Edwards did reveal that the new incarnation of the monsters stands at 350 feet - around double the height of the one seen in the 1954 film (which stood at approximately 165 feet). Godzilla's size was also taken into careful consideration - the director said that he wanted the creature to be large enough to be imposing, yet still small enough that he can emerge from behind a thicket of skyscrapers and scare the hell out of everybody.

6. The trailer's temporary score was inspired by an iPhone on shuffle

Anyone who's seen the Godzilla trailers so far will probably have noted how powerfully it intercuts snippets of footage with Ligeti's Lux aeterna, a piece of music famously used by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The haunting nature of the music perfectly complements Edwards' nightmare imagery, and its use in the trailers was thanks, in a roundabout way, to his listening habits while coming up with Godzilla's story.

"My biggest inspiration is music, usually," Edwards explained. "On my iPhone, I created a playlist as soon as this opportunity arose. I threw on all my favourite tracks and soundtracks, and I'd have this playlist on shuffle. I'd walk around at night trying to picture the movie, which is a great, fun exercise. But I've learned that making the movie isn't as much fun - it's hard work, and exhausting.

"But that's the fun bit - fantasizing about what would be really cool. What you'd get goose bumps from watching while sitting in the cinema. And it shuffled randomly on night to the 2001 track, so that sequence was born out of the music. It's so primal - it's as if the Devil made a track. It feels as though you're going into hell, which is very appropriate for that scene.

"That's not in the movie, obviously. It got embraced by the marketing, because they saw an early version of the film that has all the temp stuff in it, and so it got used - thank God - for the trailer."

7. Godzilla's roar has been recreated for Dolby Atmos

When it came to creating the movie's sound, Edwards turned to sound designer Erik Aadahl, who's previously worked on everything from Transformers to Terrence Malick's Tree Of Life."His range is fantastic," Edwards said, "and it's kind of like what we aspired to with this. It's obviously a massive, epic movie, but we wanted it to have heart and soul, and subtlety, and artistic aspects to it."

When it came to creating a new, terrifying roar for Godzilla, Aadahl went back to the original recording, generously lent by Toho, and set about trying to create a new version of it that would prove effective in a modern cinema.  

"Erik Aadahl did Godzilla's roar, and it was a lot of back and forth," Edwards said. "We decided that we wanted to embrace the original classic roar, but obviously do it in Dolby 7.1 or Atmos. And the original recording, they've only really got one.

"We asked Toho to send it over, but it doesn't do justice to the cinema experience of today. So we had to reinvent it, and so our brief was, like our design of Godzilla, 'Imagine this is a real animal, and in the 60s someone was out in the field, saw it, and went running back to Toho in Japan and tried to describe it, played them the sound, and you could understand from that description why they made all the films they made.' But when you see the real version - or the one in our movie - you understand how they went for that design, but hopefully in ours it has a bit more realism to it."

8. The production design was partly inspired by Akira

One of the striking aspects of Godzilla's visual design is its red and grey palette - look, for example, at the trailer's parachute jump sequence, where an ominous, slate-coloured sky is streaked by the crimson trails of military flares. It's the kind of distinctive use of colour that made us think of Japanese manga and anime - and Edwards revealed in the Q&A that he his designer were greatly influenced by Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira when creating the look of the movie.

"I don't know if it comes across, but one of our designers on the film - a friend called Matt - when we were designing things, and got stuck, we'd always go, 'What would Akira do?'" Edwards revealed. "Then we'd get inspired again and do these really cool drawings. So that was a big influence for me. Akira, I think, is amazing - a visually stunning movie. Matt introduced me to the original Akira graphic novels, and that was a really good resource for us."

9. Its executive producer directed 1971's Godzilla Vs The Smog Monster

Although Godzilla may only be Edwards' second film, the director's surrounded by an experienced group of filmmakers, among them cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, who shot Lynne Ramsay's beautifully stark We Need To Talk About Kevin, and Joss Whedon's superhero banquet, The Avengers. Executive producer Yoshimitsu Banno, meanwhile, is no stranger to the Godzilla series, having directed the 1971 cult entry Godzilla Vs The Smog Monster (also known as Godzilla Vs Hedora). Banno was also an assistant director to Japan's most eminent filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa, and worked with the legendary auteur on such classics as Throne Of Blood and The Hidden Fortress.

In a fabulous anecdote, Edwards spoke of a boat trip he shared with McGarvey and Banno, when the realisation suddenly hit him that he was sharing a journey with two extraordinarily talented filmmakers. "What the hell am I doing here?" Edwards quietly asked himself. "I'm from Nuneaton!"

10. Gareth Edwards hadn't seen Breaking Bad when he hired Bryan Cranston

Godzilla may have a gigantic monster dominating the skyline, but it also has a heavyweight cast to back it up, not least among them Bryan Cranston. Yet while Cranston's sublime performance in Walter White has earned him universal recognition, Edwards joked that he hadn't yet seen drama series Breaking Bad when he signed the actor up. He jokingly continued that he knew Cranston from Malcolm In The Middle, and an episode of Airwolf in 1986.

Edwards did, however, quickly add just how effective Cranston's work is in Godzilla, and that his performance was so powerful in one scene that he chose to abandon some of the more complex set-ups he'd originally envisioned, and simply had the camera slowly close in on the actor without cutting away.

It's an example, perhaps, of how Edwards has managed to port some of the nimble style of filmmaking from Monsters to this summer blockbuster in the making. "We'd figure things out on the spot a little bit," Edwards said, turning his focus to Aaron Taylor Johnson's role in the film. " There's a lot of visual storytelling in the movie, and times where there's not a lot of dialogue, so you have to be able to tell what people are thinking and feeling just by watching them - especially with our main character, Ford, played by Aaron.

"So it's really important that you have someone you feel you know just by looking at their face, and Aaron's got that in spades, I think. There's some really nice, intimate, realistic family moments that make you really care about these characters and make you feel that they're real people."

This one's not a massive surprise, given the way that Marvel Studios goes about its business, but it does have some impact on the now filming Joss Whedon's Avengers: Age Of Ultron. For cast in that movie has been Thomas Kretschmann, which was already known. He's down to play Baron Wolfgang von Strucker in the film, the leader of HYDRA.

It had previously been reported that Kretschmann had signed on for more than one film, but the man himself has now confirmed that. "I have a multi-picture deal", he told B.Z. Berlin. "Which means I will not only appear in the second part [Avengers 2] but they're planning with me for a longer period of time".

What those exact plans are remains a mystery for now. But he did drop a story about his first day on the set of Avengers: Age Of Ultron. "I was overprepared; then on the set I went up to Joss Whedon, who passes for a genius, and said 'this is my first day, this is huge, please have patience with me, I'm a bit nervous'".

Production of Avengers: Age Of Ultron moves to South Korea next we understand, having already shot for a week or two in South Africa.

More news on the film as we get it...

CBM.

There’s an urban legend that posits that the execrable 1996 Pauly Shore vehicle Bio-Dome was originally written as a third Bill & Ted film, before being turned down by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter and so repurposed with new characters. The rumour has been heavily debunked by many, including Winter himself; but frankly, it says a lot about a person if they believe it ever might have been true in the first place. Specifically, what it says is that that person hasn’t watched, or paid attention to, either of the Bill & Ted films.

What the rumour does play to is a range of assumptions about Bill and Ted: that they’re stoners, or slackers, or surfer dudes. That they’re completely lame-brained idiots who fail to understand anything about the world around them, or that they’re lazy drop-outs with no interest in bettering themselves. It’s feasible that that impression might arise from seeing a photo of the pair, reading a very brief plot summary, or learning of their use of certain slang words like “bodacious”. But these assumptions, frankly, are as lazy as Bio-Dome’s hapless lead pair Bud and Doyle – because they ignore just how much nuance there is to the characters of Bill and Ted, and to the (so far) two films in which they star.

Bill and Ted were first conceived in the early 1980s, when college friends Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson (the latter the son of the late, great Richard Matheson) were attending an improv workshop in Hollywood. Matheson had conceived the loose idea of three characters sitting around attempting to study – as he put it, they were “really, really ignorant teenage boys who know nothing about anything trying to talk about world affairs”. The three characters, named Bill, Ted and Bob, would react to any given topic by declaring it either “Excellent” or “Bogus”.

The trio became a duo when the actor playing Bob lost interest in the conceit – but Solomon and Matheson were hooked on performing as their Bill and Ted characters (respectively), and gained popularity on the local improv circuit doing so. They continued to develop the pair, even going so far as to write letters to one-another in character, and fleshed out their backstories and backgrounds. It was becoming clear to them that they wanted to develop something bigger based around the characters – but until they could find a hook, they were unsure exactly what.

That hook, when it eventually came, would involve Bill and Ted interacting with the past. Initially, Chris and Ed planned to write a sketch film, in which one sketch featured Bill and Ted bumbling through history accidentally causing just about “everything bad that had ever happened to mankind”; but Matheson Sr, who knew a thing or two about good sci-fi, suggested that the time travel plot could support a movie in its own right. While eventually considering the implications of the original plot a little too dark for a comedy, the pair got enough of “a big kick out of sending Bill and Ted back into history” that the plot about the two metalheads trying to successfully complete their history report was crafted instead.

After attracting the interest of Critters director Stephen Herek, the project bounced around Hollywood for much of the mid 1980s – at one point it was in the hands of Warner Bros, who were prompted by the success of Back to the Future to request that the original mode of time travel, a Chevrolet fan, be changed to avoid accusations of plagiarism – but eventually went into production under the eye of Dino De Laurentiis in 1987.

The characters of Bill and Ted had become slightly less skinny and nerdy than the writers had intended with the casting of Reeves and Winter (and although they were clearly still outsiders at high school, a couple of scenes that showed them as being actively unpopular with the jocks and cheerleaders were ultimately cut) but Herek was convinced that the pair were perfect for the roles. Comedian George Carlin, meanwhile, was brought in for the role of time-travelling guardian Rufus – although according to Winter, “they were going after serious people first, like Sean Connery”, and Carlin was only cast after shooting had begun. The supporting cast of historical figures were mainly played by little-known character actors, although it’s worth remarking on the presence of former Go-Gos guitarist (and solo singer of the hit single Rush Hour) Jane Wiedlin as Joan of Arc.

Although completed in time for a 1988 release, the bankruptcy of De Laurentiis Entertainment meant that Excellent Adventure’s future was uncertain until Orion Pictures picked it up, eventually getting it out to US cinemas in February 1989. As time travel comedies go, it certainly wasn’t a hit of BTTF-esque proportions – but a $40million gross from a $10million budget wasn’t bad going in the slightest, and critical reaction was solid, to boot.

It’s not hard to see why. While Excellent Adventure is a little slight and even silly in places, it’s a thoroughly entertaining romp with a handful of utterly excellent comic set pieces (particularly the mall scene). It never takes itself too seriously, but also never lampoons its characters or strays into out-and-out genre parody. It’s true that some of the time travel conceits don’t quite hang together (why is it that “the clock in San Dimas is always running” when they’re on their original quest, but they can later cross their personal timelines with enough precision to go back set up the keys and tape recorder? And hey, where and when do they find out Rufus’ name?) but there’s a lot of thought and consideration given to building the characters and their world, much of which undoubtedly comes from those early post-improv development sessions.

Consider, for example, Bill and Ted’s respective family dynamics. It’s hard to figure out exactly where the idea of Bill’s step-mother being an old high school contemporary of theirs comes from – but it’s mined for some great running gags. In fact, it’s possible to speculate that the reason for Bill and Ted’s friendship in the first place is the common element of their absent mothers (although this one falls down a shade when you know that Ted’s mother was present in earlier drafts). The point is, there’s clearly a story to both characters, and the people around them, before we even meet them – they don’t feel one-dimensional, or conjured from thin air.

The other carefully-developed element of Bill and Ted’s characters, and the one that’s perhaps the most open to misinterpretation, is their way of speaking. It’s easy to assume that the pair just fall into standard California surfer or “Valley” speak, primarily because of their use of the word “dude”. But in fact, their speech patterns are unique to themselves, and say much about their characters. Their use of words like “heinous” and “resplendent”, as well as the way they often eschew contractions, paint a picture of two guys who might not be especially smart, but who are keen to better themselves – or at the very least, to sound better, especially when speaking to elders or people in authority.

This is why the suggestion that they’re “slackers” rankles: it’s true that when we meet them they’re on the verge of flunking out of school, but this isn’t necessarily out of laziness. They’re a little dim, but they’re keen to learn, and they also just happen to be hugely preoccupied with their dream of becoming rock stars, to the detriment of paying attention to anything else in the world around them. They have clearly-defined goals in life, even if they could perhaps spend a bit more time working to achieve them (such as, you know, learning to play). And they do learn things, when given the chance – it’s highly amusing to hear them mispronounce Socrates’ name early in the film, but it’s notable that by the time they come to do their presentation, they get it right.

In fact, Bill and Ted are an extremely likeable and charming pair, and are almost completely without guile – indeed, they had sharper edges in earlier drafts of the script (including a couple of lines that border on uncomfortably homophobic in that annoyingly prevalent 1980s way), but by the time of the finished film they’ve been softened significantly, and there’s nothing cynical or mean about them. This is entirely appropriate, given the reason for their future importance to the world. The eventual success of Wyld Stallyns and the influence of their philosophy is not arbitrary, but is based on their simple and honest message: “Be excellent to each other.”

The success of Excellent Adventure made a sequel an unsurprising prospect – but the fact that 1991’s Bogus Journey exists might be the only unsurprising thing about it. It would have been easy for Matheson and Solomon to turn out another light-hearted comedy in which Bill and Ted bumped into a fresh array of historical figures, but their intent to take a markedly different approach is summed up by the sequel’s original working title: Bill & Ted Go To Hell.

Having started from the idea that Bill and Ted would be murdered by evil robot versions of themselves, and wind up in Hell as well as playing the Grim Reaper at board games in an elaborate Seventh Seal parody, Solomon and Matheson developed the concept further to take in as much bizarrely-conceived weirdness as they could throw at the screen: from a visit to heaven (in another bit of classic film pastiche, the stairway from A Matter of Life and Death was an obvious influence here), to the future setting of “Bill and Ted University”, to the greatest scientific minds in the universe, the Martians known only as “Station”.

Herek was unavailable – although approached – to shoot the sequel, and so what was now known as Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey was helmed by first-time director (and Brighton-born) Peter Hewitt. Hewett seemed to click perfectly with the far-out vision that Solomon and Matheson had for Bill and Ted’s expanded universe, and stretched a budget that was double the first film, but still a relatively modest $20 million, to bring it to the screen. Of particular note is the excellent use of prosthetics, body doubles and split-screen to pull off several scenes featuring Bill and Ted alongside their robot duplicates – not to mention the brilliant design and practical realisation of the cobbled-together-from-household-goods “good robot us’s” from the film’s final act.

While it’s a shame that Carlin has a smaller role second time out, the support cast here is generally stronger – and not just because of “Sir” James Martin’s cameo. It’s true that Joss Ackland is somewhat phoning it in as De Nomolos (he would later, rather unfairly, call the film an “embarrassing” experience), but this is more than balanced out by arguably the sequel’s strongest asset, William Sadler. He turns what initially seems like a straight man foil into a devastatingly funny turn as the Grim Reaper; and also gets a makeup-free cameo in the final scene, as the terribly British father watching the concert from his breakfast table. A word, too, for Hal Landon – having been stuck with the unforgiving role of Captain Logan in the first film, he gets a brilliant single-scene turn here, mimicking Keanu superbly after Ted possesses his father.

Overall the film has a darker visual tone than the first, but it’s one utterly bristling with imagination. At times there’s perhaps a little too much being thrown at the screen for absolutely everything to work, but you can never accuse it of a lack of ambition. And despite the shift in style, the characters remain their recognisable selves – a little older, a little more jaded, but still the same lovable Bill and Ted – in the hands of both Matheson and Solomon, and Reeves and Winter. There are also some neat structural parallels with the first film: both stories open in the future, but the optimism of Adventure’s Rufus-based intro is contrasted with the presence of De Nomolos (whose name, you may have noticed, is simply an anagram of “Ed Solomon”) in Journey; and both films end with a triumphant, auditorium-based climactic performance.

Bogus Journey’s box office fell just short of that of Excellent Adventure, but on twice the budget, it was seen as significantly less of a success. Reviews, too, were more lukewarm, which isn’t entirely unreasonable – the film draws upon a much more esoteric vision, and it’s one that was more difficult for many to buy into than the wider, mainstream appeal of the first. To those who get it, though, it remains an outstanding work – funny, daring and often deliciously clever, and it’s only a surprise that Hewitt has yet to follow it up with anything remotely resembling its freewheeling brilliance.

Despite the slow take-up on the sequel, however, Bill and Ted remain hugely beloved cult figures – and their appearances extended into other media, too. In the wake of the first film, there was an animated series (entertaining, but lightweight) and a short-lived live action show (utterly dreadful), as well as a selection of videogames and other merchandise. All of these tie-ins maintained the tone and style of Excellent Adventure– but Bogus Journey got its own spinoff courtesy of a superb, and similarly bizarre, Marvel Comics series by writer/artist Evan Dorkin.

There was also the long-running Bill and Ted’s Excellent Halloween Adventure live show at the Universal Studios parks – but given its sudden cancellation last year due to media-led accusations of homophobia, sexism and racism, it’s probably best if we ignore that one. Indeed, from the sound of it, the Halloween show seemed to be based on that erroneous “idiot stoners” perception of Bill and Ted, rather than their actual characters as seen in the films.

And then, of course, there’s the ever-present possibility of a third film. Bogus Journey seems to end on a fairly definitive note, setting up Wyld Stallyns’ long-term success and the closing montage that shows the world edging towards adopting their philosophy of peace and harmony. And yet it’s not final enough that there isn’t room for another story – so it’s perhaps not a surprise to learn that Solomon and Matheson have been working on a third script in recent years. And if what Keanu Reeves has said about the speculated plot is true, it sounds like the writers have actually come up with a good angle.

“One of the plot points,” Reeves explained in a 2012 interview, “is that these two people have been crushed by the responsibility of having to write the greatest song ever written and to change the world. And they haven't done it. So everybody is kind of like, 'Where is the song?' And we go on this expedition, go into the future to find out if we wrote the song, and one future 'us' refuses to tell us, and another future 'us' blames us for their lives because we didn't write the song, so they're living this terrible life.”

Having already seen the characters travel through history, and then the afterlife, the idea of their exploring possible alternate future timelines seems like a great way to expand the Bill and Ted story – and it sounds like a strong way of dealing with making a sequel with actors who are now two decades older (even if Winter, who has long-since devoted his career to working behind the camera, would essentially be coming out of acting retirement to do so). Certainly, when it comes to making belated sequels to beloved 1980s films, we can think of far worse possibilities.

Even if Bill & Ted 3 never happens, however, the two films that do exist are among the most inventive and entertaining sci-fi comedies going, and have ensured the characters’ popularity for the ages. And as Abraham Lincoln himself put it:

“Four score and... seven minutes ago, we your forefathers were brought forth upon a most excellent adventure, conceived by our new friends Bill and Ted. These two great gentlemen are dedicated to a proposition which was true in my time, just as it's true today. Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!”

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure: 25th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray goes on sale on March 17th.

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Heading into cinemas on November 28th this year is the first big screen adventure for Paddington Bear. His film goes simply by the name Paddington, and it's going to be a mix of live action and CG.

Colin Firth will be providing the voice of Paddington, and the film's cast includes Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Julie Walters, Nicole Kidman, Jim Broadbent and the mighty Peter Capaldi. Paul King directs. And a first teaser trailer for the film has landed, which you can see below. It's quieter than the Transformers 4 trailer too, which we've also posted today.

More on Paddington closer to the time...

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