Lynne Ramsay, the Cannes-winning director of Morvern Callar and We Need to Talk About Kevin, is to return Herman Melville's classic tale of brooding obsession on the high seas, Moby-Dick, to the big screen. Ramsay's version will not be a traditional take, however: it takes place in space.

The Glasgow-born film-maker broke the news on Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode's Radio 5 Live show on Friday. "We're taking the premise into the galaxy," she said. "So we're creating a whole new world, and a new alien. [It's] a very psychological piece, mainly taking place in the ship, a bit like Das Boot, so it's quite claustrophobic. It's another monster movie, cos the monster's Ahab.

"It's about this mad captain whose crazy need for revenge takes the crew to their death. I'm taking people into dark waters and you see some casualties on the way. It's fascinating stuff because there's so much in it."

Melville's 1851 novel centres on the good-natured wandering sailor Ishmael and his voyage on the whaling ship Pequod, commanded by the paranoiac tyrant Captain Ahab. Ishmael and the ship's rag-tag crew look on as their leader slowly descends into madness in his hunt to destroy the creature which took his leg on an earlier trip to sea.

The most famous adaptation of Melville's tale remains John Huston's fairly orthodox 1956 version starring Gregory Peck. Other iterations have tended to veer to a greater or lesser extent from the original script. Lloyd Bacon's 1930 Moby Dick even witnessed a tacked-on happy ending in which Ahab successfully killed the whale and returned home to his sweetheart, and Ramsay's film will not even be the first Moby-Dick adaptation to shift the action to space. A Japanese animated TV series, Hakugei: Legend of the Moby Dick, got there first in 1997 (the "whales" were in fact giant space ships).

Three years ago there were reports that the director of Wanted, Timur Bekmambetov, was readying a "graphic novel-style" adaptation featuring a heroic Ahab, but that project seems to have died in development hell. Ramsay indicated during the interview with Mayo and Kermode that her version will be her next film, and will probably be shot on a low budget.