Female-Led Ghostbusters Reboot's Paul Feig on Creating a New Origin Story

Director Paul Feig, best known for Bridesmaids, has confirmed via Twitter that he will be directing a Ghostbusters reboot starring a cast of "hilarious women".

Feig is in the process of writing the script with Katie Dippold, who worked with him on last year's buddy cop hit The Heat, starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy.

Entertainment Weekly sat down with the director to ask how the idea came about and what the process of kick-starting this project has been like so far.

"My favourite thing to do is work with funny women," he said. "I was like, what if it was an all-female cast? If they were all women? Suddenly, my mind kind of exploded: that would be really fun."

Feig says he had already been approached by Sony to make the film before they touched upon the idea of removing Y chromosomes from the equation and starting afresh.

"I love origin stories," he said, confirming his Ghostbusters would be one. "That's my favourite thing. I love the first one so much I don't want to do anything to ruin the memory of that. So it just felt like, let's just restart it because then we can have new dynamics.

"I want the technology to be even cooler. I want it to be really scary, and I want it to happen in our world today that hasn't gone through it so it's like, oh my God what's going on?"

Feig also revealed that he'd be open to cameos from the original Ghostbusters cast, despite the film being a reboot. "Well, I mean, look, those are my comedy heroes. So as far as I'm concerned, anybody wants to come back I welcome with open arms. It would just be in different roles now, but it would be fun to figure out how to do that."

On progress so far, Feig said: "We have a very rough, rough outline that we're working with, but definitely know the basic story, know what we want the basic characters to do, know what we want the world to do and what the rules of our world are, but nothing I want to discuss obviously.

"It's cool. I think it's a really strong origin story that feels real - as real as a ghost story is. It's going to be really fun and real. We'll make it scary and funny."