UFO seems to have a new hero to join Joshua Jackson, and will begin a trilogy...

An unexpected and very long interview with the director of the $130 million UFO movie over at forbiddenplanet.com reveals that Heroes' Ali Larter is set to join Fringe's Joshua Jackson fighting organ-snatching aliens in 2011. And also that the movie has firm franchise plans as a trilogy, with the two following films already mapped out.

The original 1970 Gerry Anderson show was set 'ten years in the future' (1980), and envisaged a world in which bad-tempered old Commander Straker (Ed Bishop) presided over a secret military organisation trying to defend the Earth from clandestine organ-snatching sorties by a dying alien race. The role that Larter is set to to take is that of Straker's second-in-command Colonel Virginia Lake, played in the original by British actress Wanda Ventham.

UFO director Matthew Gratzner says of the actress "I think she would be a great addition to the picture. Lake is very strong and obviously also very feminine, and Ali Larter definitely encompasses that."

The casting of Fringe actor Joshua Jackson as apprentice UFO-hunter Paul Foster (played in the original show by frequent Bond-contender Michael Billington) was announced in July.

UFO was a great series, and probably the first of its type to take on the dark and pessimistic tone of the 1970s. SHADO didn't always emerge victorious from its skirtmishes with the aliens, and even when it did it was frequently a pyrhhic victory.

But as the interview points out, the show was inclined to leaven its gloom with a big helping of sex-appeal, not least of which came in the form of moon-maiden Gabrielle Drake (pictured left) and her equally glittery female assistants who kept vigil against the invaders out on Luna. Surprisingly Gratzner seems intent on not jettisoning that purple hair...

"The purple hair has been an interesting debate," he says. "I don't want to give any of that away, but that's something that has gone back and forth! A lot of the costumes that we're currently doing can't be a complete mirror of the 1970 version, but they do have that same sort of tone. This is all in the future, so we can have a little bit of leeway."

But who could fill La Drake's shiny silver shoes in the new version? As with the casting of principal Ed Straker, Gratzner is keeping fairly quiet...

"Ellis? That's a tough one. We have four actresses right now that we're looking at, and it ranges from what you'd expect to something perhaps not as typical."

If they haven't asked/considered Megan Fox, I'll eat my space-helmet.

Fans of the original series will be pleased at Gratzner's determination to not veer away from the original just to be trendy. In fact the director, an acclaimed visual effects supervisor on movies such as War Of The Worlds, would like to go even further...

"To be honest," says Gratzner, "I watch UFO and I think that it would be really cool to make this movie as if it were the early seventies, just with newer technology... capturing that time, as if it is the future 1980 from the perspective of 1970. It would be neat. It would be just such a cool thing to re-imagine within the design palette of that time. I would love to make that movie. Unfortunately, I don't think a general audience could necessarily grab onto it. Certainly the fans of the original franchise could...but there's a point where you might get it so exactly like the original series that you then have to ask 'Why would we make this?'."

Gratzner says that UFO will be a hard PG-13, about the tone of the original show, "...in the neighbourhood of the way Dark Knight was rated. That had serious tones and it wasn't a kids' film per se, but it wasn't an R-rating. There's no reason to make this film R, but it's certainly not a PG rating, because there are some terrifying sequences in it. "

Forbidden Planet