He is known as the populist creator of Brit rom-com box-office hits such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually, so it may come as some surprise that Richard Curtis's next project is to be a low-budget science-fiction film about time travel.

Curtis will direct About Time from his own screenplay, his third turn behind the cameras following 2009's pirate radio paean The Boat That Rocked, which received mixed reviews and sunk at the box office. The film is being produced by Working Title, the British production company behind many of Curtis's best-known films and is said to be a mix of comedy and drama. Producer Tim Bevan told the Hollywood Reporter that casting was under way and the film was aiming to shoot in the summer.

Curtis appears to have something of a longstanding interest in time travel. He wrote an episode for the BBC's Doctor Who in 2010 during which the Doctor (Matt Smith) travelled back in time to meet Vincent Van Gogh, and also penned the Blackadder: Back & Forth special, a short film commissioned for the Millennium Dome, which saw the BBC TV series' Blackadder and his gormless servant Baldrick embark on a time-travel adventure that brought them into contact with several significant figures in British history.

Curtis most recently wrote the screenplay for War Horse, Steven Spielberg's Oscar-tipped adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's 1982 novel about a Devon farmhand who travels to the first world war trenches in an effort to bring his beloved colt Joey safely home. The New Zealand-born film-maker is also said to be planning a fresh collaboration with Blackadder co-writer Ben Elton and has written the screenplay for Stephen Daldry's upcoming film Trash, billed as a contemporary thriller set in an unnamed developing-world city.