EXCL: Goyer’s Y: The Last Man Update

A few years ago, Superhero Hype! had a chance to talk to writer/director/producer David Goyer about the movie he was producing based on Brian K. Vaughn’s post-apocalyptic comic book Y: The Last Man. In the time since then, he has directed a new suspense thriller called The Invisible and during that same time, Vaughn himself has taken a crack at the script, so Goyer updated Superhero Hype! on the status of that project: “I just was exchanging Emails with Brian Vaughn yesterday and saw his episode of ‘Lost’ last night. We’re still pushing on that, we want to make it. The screenplay has a very unique voice that is obviously similar to the comic book, and I love that voice, but it’s been harder to get traction in Hollywood with it. I really want to make the movie and make it with the voice that Brian has imbued his comic books with. I don’t want to bastardize it in anyway.”

We wondered whether Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men might make it easier for Hollywood to understand Vaughn’s vision, to which Goyer countered, “But ‘Children of Men’ didn’t do well, and here’s the bottom line: We need to find a director that loves the comic book. Once we do, it’s fine. If you love the comic book, you get it immediately. I think that will translate to a mainstream audience, but we just need to find a director that already loves the comic book, so that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Since the Vertigo comic book series will be done by then, we asked whether Vaughn would try to condense the entire series into a single movie. “No, the neat thing about his adaptation is that it’s 70% the comic book, but he did a great job adapting it,” Goyer replied. “He changed what needed to be changed. It still has that Brian K. Vaughn flavor, but it goes in a different direction, and the ending of the film in fact is different than the ending in the comic book will be.”

It was also recently announced that Goyer is spearheading a prison movie at Warner Bros. featuring Green Arrow, currently dubbed Super Max, a very ambitious and exciting project for DC Comics fans, of which Goyer told us, “I think it’s a really cool idea, and Warner Bros. went for it, but Justin Marks just wrote the first outline for the script, so it’s a long, long road.”

When we talked to Goyer last, he told us how he hadn’t been able to spend any time on the set of Batman Begins, but that might not be the case with next year’s sequel The Dark Knight. “I was always only going to be able to do a treatment for it, because I was already in preproduction for ‘The Invisible,’ so I worked for a couple months with Chris [Nolan] and then we handed it over to his brother Jonathan for a while. It was pretty organic. I wasn’t involved in the filming much for ‘Batman Begins’ ’cause I was doing ‘Blade’ at the time, but it looks like I’ll be able to hang out a lot more on this one.”

“I love comic books,” said when asked if he sees himself ever moving away from doing comic book movies. “I’m sure I’ll always be involved in doing comic book films, and it’s been nice with ‘Threshold’ and ‘The Invisible’ to do projects that weren’t comic books, but I’m sure in the next few years I’ll be back doing something else, it’s probably inevitable. I love the characters.”

Check ComingSoon.net next week for our exclusive interview with David Goyer, talking about The Invisible, which opens on April 27.

Source: Edward Douglas