Anton Yelchin: From Terminator to Tokyo

Being in two of the biggest blockbusters of 2009 must be overwhelming for a young actor, but Anton Yelchin, 21, takes it all in his stride. “They didn’t really change my life too much,” he says referring to last summer’s “Star Trek” (in which he played Mr Chekhov) and his portrayal of mankind’s future hope Kyle Reese in “Terminator 4: Salvation.”

“I just think of them as two more movies,” says Yelchin, sitting down for a chat in a studio in Tokyo’s Daikanyama. “I was happy that they were back to back and the characters couldn’t have been more different. Yeah, there were a lot of perks about being in a blockbuster. You get a bigger pay check and get to travel around the world on promotion tours.”

Yelchin says the best thing about his profession is that “I can put on so many different skins.” His latest project couldn’t be more different from the sci-fi world he has been inhabiting -- a small-budget film made in Japan with minimal special effects and very little English dialogue. “Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac,” directed by Hans Canosa (“Conversations With Other Women”), stars Maki Horikita as a student at an international school in Tokyo, who falls down the stairs and loses her memory, including the fact that fellow student Yelchin used to be her boyfriend.

“It was good fun. I was in Tokyo for about three weeks,” says Yelchin. “One of the reasons why I wanted to work on this film is because I wanted to come and make a film in a totally different country where I don’t speak the language. What you end up discovering is that everyone speaks the language of filmmaking. That becomes the common ground. I loved working with the cast and crew and got to know all of them. And I did learn some Japanese -- a couple of words that I can say and some that I can’t say here.”

Yelchin was full of praise for his co-star and director. “Maki Horikita is great. She doesn‘t speak English, yet all her scenes with me were in English. I was really impressed how she learned to act in English. She is such a lovely person inside and out. Hans is really great. As a director, he gave me a lot of freedom to do whatever I want in creating my character.”

“Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac,” of course, has far fewer special effects than Yelchin’s other films. “Special effects movies are a different challenge because you are reacting to things that you’re not seeing. Somebody holds a sign up and says pretend it is a monster and react to it. It really makes you feel like a little kid. So you learn to create your character in your mind. By the time you get to the green screen process, you know who your character is and have done all the work. You just apply that to running away from whatever is supposed to be there.”

Born in Leningrad, Yelchin moved to the U.S. with his parents when he was six months old. “You know, I don’t feel Russian at all,” he says. “I went there last year to do press for ‘Star Trek,’ but I didn’t feel anything in common, even though I speak Russian. One thing I do appreciate is that Russia’s input into world culture is profound through its writers and composers.”

Yelchin’s parents were both professional figure skaters, but the young Anton resisted following in his parents’ skating footsteps. “They tried to get me interested in figure skating when I was 4 but I just sucked at it,” he recalls. Instead, he took acting lessons in LA as he was growing up.

Music is his other love. “I’m a guitarist in a band. We play punk rock, garage rock. I write music, too. It’s not a second career, just something I do when I am unemployed. We’ve been playing gigs and I learned something interesting. When you get up on stage and connect with the audience, it’s great. When you put every ounce of yourself into every note, it is really emotional. It’s kind of like when you are acting and you hit that zone within the scene. You know you’re really nailing it.”

Yelchin has two other films in the works and a “Star Trek” sequel has been announced for 2012. “I can’t wait. They are a great cast and crew,” he says. Yelchin, who has been acting since he was 11, says he gets a lot of fan mail from Japanese fans. “I started getting mail from Japanese girls after I made ‘Hearts in Atlantis’ with Anthony Hopkins in 2001. What can I say? I think Japanese women are beautiful.”

© Japan Today