IT'S now 32 years since the beloved original of Ghostbusters, starring Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, the late Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson, became a worldwide phenomenon. 

The makers of an all-female Ghostbusters hope their reboot will have a similar effect when it's released this summer.The remaining actors will be making cameos but this is very much an origins story - with some of the funniest women in the industry - Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones - taking centre stage.

Paul Feig is helming the movie, but if he's feeling the pressure, he's doing well at hiding it. The 53-year-old even finds time away from the editing room to share, in his own words, an insight into how it came about, what fans can expect and his thoughts on the naysayers...

GETTING THE GO AHEAD

"I was contacted first by Ivan [Reitman, the producer of the original movie] when I was doing Spy. I was so honoured and love the idea of funny people fighting the paranormal world with science, but then I wasn't quite sure how to do it as a sequel, because Harold had just died and Bill didn't want to do it. Then I suddenly thought, 'What if I hire all the funny women I know and reboot it for a new generation?'"

HEADY START

"I was on the way to Comic-Con with my producing partner, Jessie Henderson, and I called Amy [Pascal, co-producer] and she said, 'Let's do it'. I was like, 'You know Katie Dippold would be great to write this,' and she said, 'Well, Katie's going to be at Comic-Con'. We met in front of the Marvel booth, went to lunch and she wanted to do it. It came together so easily it was almost frightening."

OVERLAP AVOIDANCE

"It took a while to figure out what the cast was going to be because I know so many funny women. But you have to make sure they've all got very separate personalities and they're not going to overlap, so it took a couple of months to really figure out who I was going to cast. I didn't really audition anybody, I was just playing chess in my head."

STANDING TOGETHER

"Melissa was not a shoo-in at all. With all our movies, we never set out to work together but Melissa's one of the funniest people on the planet, you've got to use her. What I love about the funniest people is that they're all team players, because they realise they can't be funny without everyone else, so they were really the best of friends during this."

THE BACKGROUND STORY

We have this really nice story of Erin [Wiig], who's seen a ghost when she was a kid and everyone thought she was crazy and Abby [McCarthy] is the only one who believed her. And then at some point, Erin got tired of being called crazy all the time so she separated herself from that. This is them coming back together and actually finding that what they believed in was true and using that info to thwart an attack."

BASIC MUST-HAVES

"We kept a lot of homages to the [original] movie. It's bad if you make a movie like this and pretend the other one didn't exist and throw out all their iconography. Katie's such a fan of the movie too and basically made a list of, 'Here are the things I'd be sad if I didn't see when I went to see a new Ghostbusters: I want to see the Ecto-1, I want to see the protein packs, and we can't not hear that song,' so we do those, but have a new origin story."

UNDERPLAYING SPECIAL EFFECTS

"The biggest challenge was not to laugh and ruin the takes because they're all so funny. It's the first time I've done something this effects driven, but didn't want it to become a total CGI movie. I wanted that interaction between actors, so they weren't acting against tennis balls and green screen all the time. [With] funny people, you need them in the moment, you can't have them pretending to be doing things, you need that interaction."

SCRIPT ADDITIONS

"We always have a level of improvisation but we never stray from the actual structure of the script. Katie's on set the entire time writing alternate jokes and we have a few other funny people around doing that. I'm coming in with stuff and obviously the cast is inventing a lot of stuff, so it's a bit of a free-for-all. Chris Hemsworth turned out to be an amazing improviser. It's not like, 'Oh the handsome guy was kind of funny' - [he's] really funny."

THE SCARES

"Tonally, I never want things to be silly and not have any stakes to them, but that said, it's fun-scary, like the original one was. I'm not a horror movie guy, I like spooky, I like creepy, and so we really play with that. But to me, it's all about the characters; are they grounded? Are they doing stuff that feels real and natural? When you're in such a fantastical world of ghosts, I really wanted that level of realism."

EVALUATING THE NAYSAYERS

"There were two levels that we had. One was outright misogyny, where people went, 'I don't want women Ghostbusters'. But then there are people who just don't want a reboot - they want a sequel and I understand that. All I can do is go: here are the reasons I did it. If you don't like it, I get it, I'm sorry and I hope you'll just give us a chance."

REMAKE REASONS

"I'm such a passionate fan boy, so I get really choked up when I walk out and see all the fans with their gear on, or when I see a little girl dressed as a Ghostbuster, it tears my heart out in a great way. That reminds me of why we're making this. I want a new generation to have this, and the idea that girls could have these heroes the way boys growing up 30 years ago had those heroes. Now everybody will have their own team and that makes me very happy."

STAYING STRONG

"To me the theme is about legitimacy. It's about believing in something that no one else believes in. How you can doubt yourself and be made to feel crazy, and to get the chance to find out that what you believe in is true. It's that eternal quest for legitimacy, which I think we all feel in our lives."

:: Ghostbusters is released in cinemas on Friday, July 15