"The producer of such blockbusters as Poltergeist, the Indiana Jones and Back to the Future trilogies, The Sixth Sense and The Bourne Identity went behind the cameras to direct apes in Congo, spiders in Arachnophobia and now dogs in Eight Below.

""I love the challenge,"" says Marshall who used combinations of 30 dogs to play the eight sled dogs in Eight Below. ""There are always so many unknowns and non-predictables when you're working with animals.""

He says audiences shouldn't be shocked when not all of the dogs survive the ordeal of being stranded during a brutal Antarctic winter.

""Disney made Old Yeller and Bambi, but like those classic films, Eight Below is a story of hope and triumph.""

Marshall and his wife, Kathleen Kennedy, are two of the busiest Hollywood producers with as many as eight high-profile projects in various stages of development.

He says The Talisman, the film version of the novel by Stephen King and Peter Straub, ""is on a back burner. There's no signs of immediate progress on that one, but it is still ours if we want to produce it.""

Marshall and Kennedy have also delayed Emma's War, in which Nicole Kidman would have played British aid worker Debora Scroggins who married a Sudanese warlord.

""Nicole is no longer attached and we've put that project on hold.""

He says Jurassic Park IV ""has a good script now, so we should have that one up and running next year for release in 2008.""

Source: LFPress"