As for his adaptation of
Y: The Last Man, we know that New Line
lost their option to turn the Brian K. Vaughan comic book series into a movie just as Trachtenberg was nearing a green light.
I loved so much what we were doing with that and I loved working on it with everyone. But the rights sort of dried up and we still hadn’t quite nailed the movie. And I think now Brian is trying to make it a TV show. It’s funny that’s what I wanted when I first read it and everyone the whole time always felt like, oh I wish this could be a TV series. I was actually really excited to make it a movie because we have so much great TV. And in fact I think we have a lot of great TV that have been inspired by Y: The Last Man and things like it. So I was excited to bring something like that to the big screen. Something that was so character oriented and had something to say, but that could also be really exciting, especially expanding on that on the big screen. But I’m sure it’ll be an awesome TV series as well. So…
And now after seeing
10 Cloverfield Lane, I wondered again what a Dan Trachtenberg
Y: The Last Man movie might even look like. Dan was happy to entertain the idea of what could have been:
It was very much a combination of the first two trades, the first movie was going to be. And it combined some characters in the story. Some of the threats into one… It combined some of the threats. But I looked a lot at Big Trouble in Little China for inspiration, ’cause that’s a movie where the protagonist is actually the sidekick and Yorick is very much the sidekick to much stronger, capable heroes being women. And Raiders of the Lost Ark was a major influence ’cause it really was fun to dig into some set pieces that in the comic were just a couple pages, but or a splash page even and for us would be a whole sequence. So in the comic there’s a splash page where they’re on a train and they’re getting robbed by bandits. And that’s sort of the end of it. But for us that was a full sequence. That was a whole like throwback to a Great Train Robbery and Wild Wild West, but in a modern train. And just digging into that was super fun.
