You may know Dan Trachtenberg from Totally Rad Show or from Portal: No Escape, the fan film he premiered at a Comic-Con panel. Now he’s also New Line Cinema’s choice to direct Y: The Last Man. The five-time Eisner Award winning comic follows the last living man, Yorick Brown, and his pet Capuchin monkey Ampersand as they try to find Yorick’s girlfriend. The twist is that he really does have a girlfriend, as opposed to ignoring all the other suddenly-available women because he “has a girlfriend, you wouldn’t know her.”
Y: The Last Man has been in development for at least seven years. When we first heard about it, DJ Caruso was directing and wanted Shia LaBeouf to star. Then Louis Leterrier (Clash of the Titans) replaced Caruso and Jericho writers Matthew Federman and Stephen Scaia were hired to write the script. We learned last September that the studio liked that script and weren’t planning on casting Shia LaBeouf (good news on both fronts).
Here’s Dan Trachtenberg talking about Y: The Last Man back in 2006 . (Starts at 0:55 and contains spoilers.)
So he’s a fan from way back, going so far as to tweet that directing Y: The Last Man is his dream job. And just for the hell of it, here’s Dan Trachtenberg’s Portal fan film again. It stars Danielle Rayne with visual effects by Jon Chesson and music by Mike Zarin.
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This is infuriating. Why waste a property like this on an untested director? His experience is in 30 second commercials with one 5 minute short film that has no dialogue? This is the guy you want to helm a 60 issue dystopian comic book series that has major sequences on three separate continents, not even counting the issues in space? HBO or GTFO
Can someone please tell me when the American Gods TV show comes out?
bring brian k vaughn in as a consultant, impoves movie by a billion %
Interesting choices for directors, I always thought Y would be perfect for Alfonso Cuarón. Children of Men, Prisoner of Azkaban, yeah he would kill on this. Hopefully BKV’s involvment will keep this on track the way Wagners did for Dredd.
Vaugham has screenwriting experience, so hopefully he gets a lot of input on this. Unfortunately, I think this has been optioned for some time now, and I’m not sure what kind of initial deal was set in place for the project. With names like DJ Caruso and Shia Labeouf, I’d say he doesn’t have a lot of pull for where they take the movie now that they have the rights.
I think Scarfield would make a pretty solid Yorick