Terminator Salvation - Anton Yelchin Interview at WonderCon
Anton Yelchin stars as the young Kyle Reese in Warner Bros Pictures' much anticipated fourth movie of the 'Terminator' franchise, 'Terminator Salvation.' At the 2009 WonderCon, Yelchin explained how his character fits into this 'Terminator' world.
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Transcript: Terminator Salvation - Anton Yelchin Interview at WonderCon
Rebecca Murray from About.com Hollywood Movies at the 2009 WonderCon.
Anton Yelchin – 'Kyle Reese' in Terminator Salvation
Where do we meet him in his life in this film?Anton Yelchin: "I think you meet Kyle Reese, he's a young man – his late teens – and you meet a kid that has lived his whole life running from death and destruction and trying to survive in a world of just horrific things. One of the things that I realized would shape this character was that all he knows is death, you know? And his whole life is a quest to survive. That's all it is – it's survival. It's like any person living in a country wracked by war, they live in this state all the time and that shapes them. And you see there's a paranoia in Michael Biehn's performance and an intensity and a vulnerability, and a kind of instability but an instability that seems to have changed with his becoming part of the resistance. So you see that when he tells her all of these things, but in that directness there's kind of an anger and a strength and a pain to it, so it's really a layered character. I thought I was fascinating to bring those things to a younger character. I think traditionally you have characters that start off younger, they're not the hero yet, you see them grow and become courageous. I thought no one is going to want to see a Kyle Reese that isn't courageous, that isn't that Kyle Reese. So what is essential is to have that Kyle Reese and maybe even heighten certain things. Maybe he doesn't know how to control his anger. Maybe he can make mistakes because he's just… There has to be that drive that you saw, but there has to be an increase in the vulnerability in terms of his emotions going in different places, you know? And because I'm a huge fan of Terminator, I could never imagine not having that Michael Biehn heroic quality within this character. And that's what was essential, you know? It's just finding maybe the hero is a little angrier in this one or something, you know? But he's always the hero. From the first scene that we meet him, he is the hero and he's saving Marcus Wright. That is Michael Biehn. I think as a fan that's what you want to see in the character, and as a fan that's what I wanted to bring to it."
You were a huge Terminator fan going into it?
Anton Yelchin: "Huge fan, huge fan."
So how does this live up to those first two, not necessarily the third one because I don't see the third one…?
Anton Yelchin: "I don't either. No offense to it but it is what it is. I really think we all went into this film wanting to honor those first two. We're all huge fans. McG stressed our sort of kind of linking, this inter-textual kind of linkage to occur between one, two and four. So our goal was always to honor that spirit of [Jim] Cameron's movies. To bring as many things as we could from Cameron's movies to this movie. To maybe have fans see, 'Oh, Kyle Reese learned that from this person.' Or, 'Connor got that,' you know? Things fans will enjoy. And so that was always a goal and we kind of went with that from the first day is to bring all of those qualities to it. To have that grit and dirt and maybe that paranoia and the machines and the kind of the brutality of Skynet, you know, etc. etc, to bring all of that to this film so when you watch it you are seeing a Terminator. You're not seeing him wearing rose-colored glasses, for lack of a better example."
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