Ewan McGregor promises that Tim Burton's new movie, Big Fish, will be quite a catch this Christmas. "It's a sea fable. Albert Finney is this old sea-salt storyteller who's dying. He's never really connected with his son, who's played by Billy Crudup," says McGregor, who is currently in Australia filming the final chapter of the new Star Wars trilogy.

"To try to understand his father, the son gets his dad to tell him some of his tall tales. The audience gets to see them unfold and I play the young Albert Finney in those stories."

McGregor says, "This is not a Sleepy Hollow kind of Tim Burton movie. It's not special effects-heavy, but it is a funny, sad, outrageous kind of movie."

Burton assembled quite an all-star supporting cast, including Jessica Lange as Finney's wife, his own girlfriend Helena Bonham Carter as all the women in the tall tales and Danny DeVito, Robert Guillaume, Alison Lohman and Steve Buscemi in cameo roles.

McGregor says once he finishes Star Wars: Episode III, he could begin work on Jodie Foster's long-delayed project Flora Plum.

Set in the 1930s, Claire Danes would play a street urchin who is befriended by a circus freak. He falls in love with her, but she soon becomes a major star.

McGregor will play the circus freak, a role that belonged to Russell Crowe for a brief time two years ago.

"Flora Plum is apparently happening right after Star Wars, but Jodie says it's not fully green-lit yet," McGregor says.

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Funnyman Mel Brooks is in negotiations with Universal Studios to bring his hit stage musical The Producers to the screen.

Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick would reprise their Tony Award-winning roles as a pair of Broadway producers who try to create a flop so they can keep their backers' money.

The plan backfires and their musical, Springtime for Hitler, becomes a huge hit.

The Producers began life as a 1968 movie starring Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel.

It just opened in L.A. with Martin Short and Jason Alexander in the lead roles and will soon open in Toronto.

Brooks, 76, says he is so rejuvenated by the success of The Producers he is contemplating turning either Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles, his other hit movies, into a stage musical.