With The Expendables soon storming our screens and Rambo 5 tooling up, you'd think Sylvester Stallone might want to take a breather from the massive explosions and give peace a bit of a chance. Well, you'd be half right. The Italian Stallone has a few things on his mind and one of them is a remake of '70s exploitationer Death Wish.

"I'm thinking about it," Stallone told us. "It's a classic morality tale, where you take a civilised man and take away everything that matters to him so he becomes primitive again."

Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted some thematic similarities between John Rambo and the gnarly vigilante played by Charles Bronson, but the idea of Rambo-Takes-Broadway is still very much at the chewing-over stage. "The story's been done many times, and when it's done well, it's an emotionally engaging film. The trouble with remakes is that people fall in love with the original. It's like peanut butter. If you try to change the taste of peanut butter, you're in trouble."

It's not all angst-ridden mayhem in the Stallone diary, though. Tearing around the Latin jungle with Dolph Lundgren and the Stath would get anyone's creative juices flowing, but it's still a bit of a surprise to hear his passion for a biopic of writer Edgar Allan Poe, high priest of the American Gothic. "I keep telling my producer Avi Lerner, 'Make Edgar Allan Poe!' He says, 'Does he have a gun?' 'No, he doesn't have a gun', 'Can he throw a knife?' I say, 'No, he writes poetry!'

Sadly the awesome sight of Stallone, quill pen in hand, bashing out The Pit And The Pendulum will be denied us. "Of course, I'm not playing Poe. 'Yo, Poe!' It won't work! It'll be some young actor because he dies at 39, but it's gonna happen."

Another project likely to go Stallone-less is a mooted Cliffhanger sequel. "I hear they're gonna remake it," Sly said. "You know you've been around when they start to remake your own movies when you're still alive." Mind you, judging by this small army of very corrupt and very dead Latin-types, we can't imagine the odd cliff would present too much of a problem.