Gerry Anderson: Three, two, one...

Thunderbirds are go! A live-action version of the sci-fi series is now being filmed, but the man behind the puppets – Gerry Anderson – almost got left out in the cold. He tells Matthew Sweet why

In the summer of 1957, the founder of a small British production company was approached to direct a children's series for ATV. He didn't need to be asked twice. AP Films was on the point of bankruptcy. It was only after he'd agreed to take the job that he realised that the star of The Adventures of Twizzle was not going to be an actor, but a small puppet with red hair and extendable legs. "My dream of becoming Stanley Kubrick," says Gerry Anderson, "fell to pieces in an instant."

Gerry Anderson – MBE, father of Supermarionation – has a surprisingly equivocal relationship with the stringed instruments that made him a household name. He's not resentful, exactly, of Lady Penelope, Troy Tempest and Zoony the Lazoon from the planet Colevio. He won't be discovered locked in a fatal embrace with one of his own creations, like that scene at the end of Dead of Night (1945) in which Michael Redgrave is strangled by his own ventriloquist's dummy. But it was never his intention to spend so much of his career in their company, and he can't pretend it was all he ever wanted to do. Tellingly, perhaps, he refers to all of his live-action TV series as movies.

"It's only comparatively recently that I've taken a liking to any of the puppet shows that I've made," he explains, sitting at the boardroom table in his offices at Pinewood studios. "I always used to think that they were terrible. I didn't see much on screen but the faults. I couldn't get a puppet to pick something up, or to walk. Their mouths were like letterboxes flapping open and shut. But I got to the point where I thought I'd better stop running down these pictures, because everybody in the world except me seems to like them."

Anderson also has less sentimental reasons to stop knocking his own back catalogue. On 14 April – which, coincidentally, will be his 74th birthday – he and his team at Pinewood will go into preproduction on a new 26-part, £30m revival of Captain Scarlet. This time, he has cut the strings: the series will be made entirely in CGI. And just to show that he hasn't abandoned his roots, a screen caption will announce that the new series is filmed in "Hypermarionation".

Gerry Anderson has had his fair share of wilderness years, but 2003 and 2004 will not be among them. The Complete Gerry Anderson, a Bible for admirers of Fireball XL5 and Joe 90, is published next week. (My favourite fact from its pages: the Space 1999 episode "The Rules of Luton" got its name when its American writer spotted a sign on the M1 that he thought sounded appropriately extraterrestrial.) Charles Bender, the producer of Solaris (2002), has his eye on a remake of the 1970s Anderson live-action series UFO. And Thunderbirds – the archetypal sci-fi puppet extravaganza in which five plastic brothers and a plastic toff in a pink Roller saved the world from one spectacular set-piece special-effect after another – is about to be revived in two different forms.

After two decades of company takeovers and the imprisonment of the Australian media magnate Alan Bond for fraud, the TV rights to Thunderbirds have passed to Carlton, which intends to bring back International Rescue as a CGI animation. The movie rights have seceded to Working Title, which now has a $70m (£45m), big screen, live action, no-strings-attached version of the show in production at Pinewood studios, with Bill Paxton and Ben Kingsley in the lead roles, and the Star Trek alumnus Jonathan Frakes behind the camera. Incarnated as flesh-and-blood actors, the Tracy family will finally be able to conquer a hazard that defeated them in the 1960s – walking through doors with lintels.

Anderson hasn't always been served well by the companies that have inherited the rights to his ideas. Carlton is negotiating with him to join their Thunderbirds television series in an advisory capacity, but the behaviour of Working Title has been less considerate. He hasn't been asked for his advice. He hasn't even been offered a courtesy visit to the set – despite it being a 60-second golf-buggy ride from the offices of Anderson Entertainment.

I'm told, before the interview, not to press him about his dealings with Working Title, but find myself doing it anyway. The legalistic caution with which he discusses the subject suggests that his real feelings on the matter are less than temperate. He wouldn't be so ill-mannered as to sound off about their behaviour, but then, he doesn't need to. On web pages and in fanzines, his die-hard admirers are doing it for him. Anderson's treatment, rages one acolyte, has been "atrocious". Without the creative input of the Master, the Thunderbirds film will have "turkey written all over it".

Now, however, the fans can down their cudgels. Jonathan Frakes has been sneaking over from his set for long chats with Anderson, and consequently, Working Title has agreed to do right by the man from whose creations they are hoping to squeeze a fortune in merchandising licences. Anderson hopes by the end of today to have signed a consultancy deal with Universal, Working Title's parent company. But he warns that they will not be able to expect too much help from him – and if he thinks the project has any turkey-like qualities, he will tell them.

"I'm doing my own thing," he says, "so I haven't got all the time in the world, and also I know consultants can be a pain in the arse, which I don't intend to be. It's Jonathan's picture. If he asks me what I think I will happily tell him, and if I can help him to make it a better picture I will. But I won't be going down there every five minutes interfering with them."

Gerry Anderson was born in London in 1929. Had his grandparents remained in their hometown on the Russian-Polish border, and not sailed for Britain in 1895, he would have been a Bieloglovski. The name defeated the immigration official who checked them in off the boat: he scribbled "Abrahams" down in his register. But the family didn't keep their new name for long, and "Anderson" was chosen simply because his mother, Deborah, liked the sound of it. Gerry was the second child of his parents' marriage. His elder brother, Lionel, was an RAF pilot who ran 38 wartime missions before he went missing over enemy territory. The name of the American airstrip where he completed his basic training – Thunderbird Field – stuck in his younger brother's mind.

Anderson's film career began at the Colonial Film Unit, where, as a teenager, he trained under George Pearson, an eminent director of silent British films who, by the 1930s, had slipped into obscurity. In 1957, he set up his own production company at Islet Park, an Edwardian mansion on the banks of the Thames at Maidenhead, and found himself in charge of Twizzle. The success of this programmes led Anderson to Torchy the Battery Boy – a luminous schoolboy who lived in a town formed entirely from carved fruit – and Four Feather Falls, a comic Western performed by marionettes and voiced by Nicholas Parsons.

Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray were the first productions to take on the recognisable characteristics of a Gerry Anderson series – elaborate special effects, futuristic vehicles, a cast of characters working within some kind of hi-tech troubleshooting agency. "I was doing puppet shows," he explains, "but I wanted to make decent feature films. So what did I do? I tried to make the puppets look and behave like actors. And then in order to enhance that I introduced special effects. So without realising it, I was creating something new. And whether you think they were good or bad, there was nothing else like them on television anywhere in the world."

He can still remember the 7.30am meeting at which he pitched Thunderbirds to Lew Grade, the head of ATV and its international distribution arm, ITC. They sat down in his office, drank coffee from little silver cups, and broke out the Havana cigars. Grade leaned back in his chair and asked Anderson to sock him with his new idea: Anderson warned him that it was going to prove so costly that he wasn't sure whether Grade would want to risk backing it.

"You have to believe me," says Anderson, "but he got up from his desk, came round the table and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. I thought he was going to hit me. I was really quite scared. He pulled me out of the chair into the centre of the office, and he said, 'You see that light bulb? If you want to make a television series about that light bulb, I'll back it.' So we sat down and I told him about International Rescue, and at the end of 20 minutes he told me to go off and start work."

Under Grade's stewardship, Anderson enjoyed his most consistently productive period. He at last got his wish to produce a series in which the stars were not hung up on hooks at the end of a day's filming. He put Ed Bishop and Gabrielle Drake into battle against a covert alien invasion in UFO. He blasted Martin Landau and the staff of Moonbase Alpha into the void for the optimistically-titled Space: 1999. He imported Robert Vaughn, star of The Man From Uncle, for The Protectors – although this experience made him feel nostalgic for co-operative leading men such as Scott Tracy. "Robert Vaughn hated me. I didn't like him too much either. I think he hated me mainly because I threatened him once with litigation. I believe that if people are working together to make a movie, anybody who lets the side down needs to be stamped on. And I did a little bit of stamping."

Space: 1999 proved a watershed in Anderson's life. During its production, his long relationship with ITC came to end, as did his slightly longer marriage to his second wife, Sylvia. Acrimonious is too pale a term to describe the collapse of their marriage (this is another subject that I'm asked by the PRs to avoid), but the support of his fans, who first began to mobilise in the early 1980s, helped him get through it.

"They are without question the most trustworthy group of people I have ever met in my life," he affirms. "Would I want to collect memorabilia? No. Do I understand them? No. But if they enjoy it, who am I to question it? Like most people, I've had good times, and I've had some pretty rough times. There were a few years when I couldn't pay my bills, spent all my time worrying, lost all my confidence. And the fans were a great help. When I rang them, they never said, 'oh, it's Gerry on the phone, Gerry's gone down the plughole'. They were just as respectful and friendly and encouraging as they ever were."

And they continue to be, commiserating with him whenever a cherished project – a planned feature film called Eternity, for instance – hits a brick wall.

1999 has been and gone, and – like his dream of being the next Kubrick – the futures conceived by Gerry Anderson have failed to materialise. There was no Moonbase Alpha. The Nehru suit never caught on. Gull-wing jet-propelled cars failed to roll off the production lines. The World Government was never elected.

"I got it very, very wrong," he muses. "I thought everything would be stainless steel and sanitised and we'd all be walking around in brilliant white suits that never got dirty, and that there'd be no more disease or war." It's appropriate, then, that in 2003, Anderson has chosen to revive the most compromised of his utopias.

Each episode of the original Captain Scarlet was prefaced by a booming threat from the disembodied voice of humanity's arch-enemies, the Mysterons. "We know that you can hear us, Earthmen. We will deal another crushing blow. We told you we intend to obliterate the sub-continent of North America. We will be avenged!" The original series opened with a plot about the assassination of a world leader by a suicide bomber. "The Mysterons are waging a war of nerves," says Anderson, "and here we have, inevitably, ramming buildings, planting bombs, trying to kill the president." The subject of Captain Scarlet, he concedes, is terrorism. So in one discomfiting respect, Anderson – a man still impelled by the force of an accidental entanglement with a marionette called Twizzle – got it very right indeed. More right, perhaps, than Kubrick.

'The Complete Gerry Anderson' is published by Reynolds and Hearn on 9 April, price £15.99