Harry Potter movie director David Yates is set to direct a big screen Doctor Who movie for the BBC.

Yates told Daily Variety he was preparing to start work on a Doctor Who movie with BBC Worldwide’s VP of programming and production Jane Tranter, who is based in Los Angeles and was responsible for relaunching Doctor Who on BBC TV in 2005.

‘We’re looking at writers now. We’re going to spend two to three years to get it right,’ Yates told Variety. ‘It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena.’

Yates confirmed that the movie would not be connected to the recent BBC ‘reboot’ of the series under Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat. ‘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,’ he said.

Yates directed the most recent four Harry Potter movies. While the BBC made several attempts to mount a Doctor Who movie while the TV show was off air between 1989 and 2005, no director has ever been named before. ‘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,’ Yates said. ‘We want a British sensibility, but having said that, Steve Kloves wrote the Potter films and captured that British sensibility perfectly, so we are looking at American writers too.’

Update: Steven Moffat has now apparently reacted to the news

See also: Yates explains why he didn’t take The Stand

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