“How would you like to be in the desert where it's 100 degrees and you're on stilts wearing pyjamas?” That's the question Andrew Stanton, director of John Carter , asked Willem Dafoe and Samantha Morten and yet both stars still signed up to the production.

“I struck gold,” the director said ab🌼out the actors, including Taylor Kitsch who plays John Carter.

Dafoe and Morten play Tharks, green-skinned alie🥀ns who are much taller than Carter's civil war soldier - hence the stilts and those pyjamas, which were actua✨lly motion capture clothing.

This is the first live-action movie for Stanton ( Finding Nemo , Wall-E ), who said he first came into contact with Edgar Rice Burrough🎀s' character through Marvel's 1970s comic-books and had even drawn the hero at a young age.

A glass-half-full D23 audience member might think Disney is getting a little twitchy about the film, given the a♌mount of time it spent previewinಞg it at D23.

That included four clips from the film, which saw John wake up on Mars and witness the birth of baby Tharks; his early meeting with Tars Tarkas (Dafoe) and the realisation that the lesser gravity allows him to jump like a superhero; an encounter with a dog-like creature while imprisoned in the Thark nursery; a heart to heart with a humanoid princess who is about to be forced into an arranged marriage; and a Star Wars -type battle sceneꦆ with Tarkas and Carter sentenced to death by angry white ape in an arena.

It all looks good (particularly the CGI dog) and from the early footage♕ there's a serious, sombre tone to the film. UK audiences will have to wait until 9 March 201ꦜ2 to see if it hangs together as a finished movie.