Robert Zemeckis to Adapt and Direct Roald Dahl's THE WITCHES for the Big Screen

According to Entertainment Weekly, Robert Zemeckis is in final talks to adapt and direct Warner Bros'. take on Roald Dahl's beloved children's book The Witches.

Zemeckis will pen the script and produce with Jack Rapke, under their ImageMovers banner. Also on board as producers are Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón. (Before Zemeckis, Del Toro had long been linked to The Witches as a potential director.)

Dahl's 1973 novel follows a young boy whose life is turned upside down when he discovers the existence of child-hating witches. The book was previously turned into a film in 1990, which diverged a great deal from its source material and starred Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch. Dahl reportedly found that takeon his novel to be "utterly appalling."

Credited as "one of the greatest visual storytellers in filmmaking", he first came to public attention in the 1980s as the director of Romancing the Stone (1984) and the science-fiction comedy Back to the Future film trilogy, as well as the live-action/animated comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). In the 1990s he directed Death Becomes Her and then diversified into more dramatic fare, including 1994's Forrest Gump, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director. The film itself won Best Picture. The films he has directed have ranged across a wide variety of genres, for both adults and families.

Zemeckis's films are characterized by an interest in state-of-the-art special effects, including the early use of the insertion of computer graphics into live-action footage in Back to the Future Part II (1989) and Forrest Gump, and the pioneering performance capture techniques seen in The Polar Express (2004), Beowulf (2007), and A Christmas Carol (2009).