At the LA press day for Warner Bros Pictures' Terminator Salvation, Yelchin talked about life on the set of the big budget action film directed by McG.:
What were the biggest practical sets?
Anton Yelchin: "You know, a lot of the film, we didn’t have as much greenscreen as you would think and that’s to McG’s credit because it puts you in that headspace. The toy factory was a huge set in Albuquerque. It was an abandoned railyard that was turned into a toy factory. They brought in busses and cars and filled them with dead bodies. They set up camp at the very top. They set up a huge...that thing that they drop on the T-600, they set all that up. That was an incredible set. The Skynet facility was pretty much all practical. Once again, enormous set. The Terminator factory, enormous, rank, very unhealthy set. That place was just putrid, as it should be - as a Terminator factory should be."
It didn't need to smell real...
Anton Yelchin: "Yeah, right. It just happened to be. Yeah, the Skynet facility just went on and on and on. The Skynet they built on stages though, so it was a little different. But I was really impressed with the toy factory because I had gotten there weeks before we were going to shoot the scene, actually probably maybe a month and a half or so before, and there was nothing there. It was just a railyard. McG, Sam [Worthington] and I went up the steps, looked around, vaguely blocked out what the scene was going to be. McG blocked out Sam walking up, seeing the guy in the distance, etc. etc. Then I came a month later, it was the apocalypse."
We only see the diluted film version. What did it look like in real life?
Anton Yelchin: "That edited the color slightly. That changed the color slightly, but pretty much what you saw and the feel that you got was kind of the feel that we had. There were still those sort of reds, the red plants and whatnot. It’s not in the movie a lot, but I feel like everything that the set designers did, the process they did heightened that."
The 100 ft tall Terminator, were at least the legs practical?
Anton Yelchin: "There were people being ratcheted. No, that was pretty much CG. Pretty much only the Terminator was CG. Every explosion that you see was real. They blew up that gas station. They blew up all the cars."
And the motorcycles chasing you?
Anton Yelchin: "Those were guys on motorcycles. I actually shot at one, burned his jeans."
How hard is it to cock a shotgun one-handed?
Anton Yelchin: "You know, it just takes practice, like anything else. I worked on it for like two weeks. We just got it. The cool thing on the side of the truck, it’s different from when you’re standing there. If you’re standing there, you have two hands. If you’re on the truck, you have to hold on with one hand. So if you watch the film, what I do is I cock it one-handed, throw it up a little, catch it and then shoot, which I thought was pretty cool when I saw it. I was like, 'Oh, nice.' That was something I practiced a lot because I knew I would have to hold onto something."
"That was one of the things that I got to Albuquerque and I had a breakdown of everything that had to be there. That was one of those superficial elements of just the badass elements that I was like, 'We need to have it in there. If I get a shotgun, I have to do it. There’s no question.' Trudy, the script supervisor, had worked on T2 so when I was doing the shotgun cock, she was like, 'You have to do it. You need to do it in this scene, you need to do it now, it looks awesome.' And I was like, 'Trudy, I love Terminator. I’m with you. There’s no question about it.' I was so stoked."
Did we lose any Kyle Reese moments for the PG-13?
Anton Yelchin: "No, none that I can think of. PG-13 encapsulates a hell of a lot of action so all my action stayed in there. I didn’t have to show my tits or anything. There weren’t a lot of f--ks or anything like that, so not at all."
Any inklings of a Star Trek sequel already?
Anton Yelchin: "It’s the same way I feel about this film. We got asked this question a lot, 'Are you doing sequels?' Naturally, but my idea is you’re getting ahead of yourself by talking about sequels when the movie hasn’t come out yet. Of course there’s a massive business side to these films, but for me it’s all about making the best possible thing we can make now and then I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it."
What are you doing next?
Anton Yelchin: "Right now, I’m just reading scripts. Bill Macy’s directing a film and I’ve been talking to him about that. I was lucky with these two films because sometimes character, in the best of spectacle films, the films work because you care about the characters but oftentimes you see a movie where character and everything is secondary to the special effects. With these two films, the characters were really fascinating to me. How to reinterpret the joy and optimism of Chekov, how to work with all the things I talked about with Kyle Reese... So, preferably, I’d like to just work on another interesting character next."
Have you had your fill of big spectacle?
Anton Yelchin: "You know, I feel like it was actually a while ago that we finished this movie. I mean, if I got, for some reason, if another film of this sort was offered to me, if there’s an interesting character, I’d be interested in doing it. It’s all about the characters. That’s my job. It’s the special effects guys’ job to worry about the spectacle part of it. My job is to try and make my character as interesting as possible and do all the work I usually do to make that character work within the framework of this spectacle film."
