Roman Polanski, the Polish film director best known for his twisted portraits of adult psychosis and suffering, plans to turn next to filming a Dickens novel.

The 70-year-old auteur is preparing a film of Oliver Twist, Dickens' gruelling story of workhouse hardship and pick-pocket gangs on the streets of London.

At least a dozen directors have adapted the book for the screen since 1912, but Polanski seems unperturbed about that.

"I love Dickens and I want to make a family movie," he said. He sees condensing the classic into a two-hour movie as a challenge. He was inspired to make it, he said, by his children, aged 10 and five.

Polanski, who at the moment is leading the jury of the Deauville film festival in Normandy, said his Oliver Twist would have a British cast and would be filmed in Europe next summer.

The novel will be adapted by Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for Polanski's much-garlanded Holocaust epic The Pianist.

Harwood said: "This is a remarkable novel and we will do it well. I don't give a damn about all the other adaptations."

Polanski is no stranger to literary adaptations. He was nominated for an Oscar for Tess, his film of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

But critics are bound to question the need to remake a Dickens novel which has already been adapted so well for the screen. In 1948 David Lean's dark interpretation cast Alec Guinness as Fagin. Carol Reed's 1969 musical Oliver! won four Oscars.

There have been about 3,000 adaptations of Dickens novels, including 87 films and 71 television dramas. Some directors have re-interpreted the texts - Great Expectations, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke, was transposed to the modern-day New York arts scene.

Polanski is unlikely to film Oliver Twist in London. He has not set foot in Britain since the 1970s when he fled the US after pleading guilty to having sex with an under-age girl. He still fears extradition to the US on a rape charge. For Tess, he recreated Dorset in Normandy.

And at the Deauville festival Harrison Ford delivered the Oscar for The Pianist which Polanski could not go to Hollywood to collect.