MTV News have spoken to Louis Leterrier who directed 2008’s ‘The Incredible Hulk’ and this year’s ‘Clash of the Titans’ about his interest in a film adaptation of the comic book series ‘Y: The Last Man’.
Rumours and speculation have been circulating for a while now regarding such an adaptation with Shia Labeouf being attached to the lead role of Yorrick, and with D.J. Caruso in the directing chair.
Leterrier however told MTV News that “I’m surprised that it hasn’t gotten made yet. The first time I read it, I was in France and doing my little movies, and I didn’t think I would ever have access to these kinds of movies. Midway through ‘Clash of the Titans,’ I was like, ‘What’s going on with ‘Y The Last Man’?’ I called one of the producers and asked what was going on, and he said it was available. I said, ‘Let’s go!”
Leterrier continued by saying “DJ Caruso was supposed to do it with Shia Labeouf, and that sort of went on and was over, so I went in and said, ‘Please, please let me have it!”.
Unfortunately it appears there is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding the project, including whether it should be approached as a single film, a series of films or a TV series though Leterrier still appears keen to be involved with a TV series being one of his preferred options.
Having read the series and looking at the various options for translation, you simply couldn’t do justice to the source material by condensing it all down into one film. So much would be lost that it’d really just be the title and basic concept that could be utilised in one film. Many compromises would need to be made.
A series of films or even better a TV series would allow the depth of story to be explored more fully, with a structured beginning, middle and end to be planned for from the start based across the sixty issues of the comics.
Hopefully with things like ‘The Walking Dead’ and ‘Human Target’ having started, if successful it might draw some more attention to the idea of adapting comics as TV shows rather than feature films which to me, in a lot of cases seems a more natural transition.
