BBC Worldwide Productions has confirmed that a new feature film version of Doctor Who is being worked on in Los Angeles.

The Harry Potter director David Yates has told the industry newspaper Variety that he’ll be directing.

No cast or even story is yet in place and it could be at least three years before the new film reaches the big screen.

Yates told Variety he would be starting from scratch, giving the BBC’s eccentric space and time-traveller a “radical transformation” to take him to a “bigger arena,” shunning what he called the “fantastic” work done by Russel T Davies and Steven Moffat, who – in their own ways – updated the earlier incarnations of the character for prime-time TV.

Doctor Who began life on BBC TV in the early 1960s and made a couple of big screen appearances, with Peter Cushing as the eponymous hero in the mid 60s, but since then, he’s been confined to TV.

Yates is currently looking for writers on both sides of the Atlantic. “We want a British sensibility,” he told Variety. “But having said that, Steve Kloves wrote the Potter films and captured that British sensibility perfectly, so we are looking at American writers too.”