Interview

DIANE LANE: Anton, I've missed you! The last time I saw you was at the screening of our movie, Fierce People, which comes out this month. What grade are you in now?

ANTON YELCHIN: Eleventh. They like to say this is the year that counts, as though none of the other years really mattered.

DL: Do you have college plans?

AY: Yeah, I kind of want to go to Yale-it's supposed to have a good arts program. Donald Sutherland told me I should go to Middlebury, so I thought I'd check that out, too.

DL: I went and looked at NYU with my stepson earlier this year. He's a senior now, so it's true-grit time in our house. Walking around the campus I thought, My God, there's no way I could study in this environment. The distraction of being a student right there at the core of Manhattan in Greenwich Village must be so distracting for a student. I'd rather go someplace off in Vermont where I could just stay focused and do my thing. But I'm very impressed you're going forward with your studies.

AY: It's going to be hard, because I don't know whether I should go to school right away or continue acting for a few years after I finish high school. It seems like all of a sudden I have to make these decisions that are going to affect the rest of my life.

DL: Well, all plans are made to be interrupted anyway. Do you do the whole tutor thing?

AY: Yeah, the first tutor I worked with is one of my closest friends, but he retired, so I'm studying with one of his friends. She worked with me on Alpha Dog, the last movie I did.

DL: Tell me something about that movie.

AY: Nick Cassavetes directed it. He's this huge guy who's pretty loud and profane. He seems really tough, but he's actually very sensitive. He cried so many times during the filming of some of the heavier scenes-it's something you'd never have expected.

DL: Well, the most tender hearts need the toughest armor, don't they?

AY: Yeah. I'd like to imagine that that's how [director and Nick's father] John Cassavetes was as well. I don't know where else Nick would have gotten it from.

DL: It's wonderful to be working for people who inspire you. Have you seen the finished movie?

AY: Yeah, and I liked it a lot, though it's hard to watch. It's about these guys who kidnap this kid because his brother owes them money. It's all tied in to drugs and stuff. It's an upsetting story and it actually happened; like Nick, it's extraordinarily direct. There's no BS at all.

DL: I know you love photography and reading. Is there anybody who moves you whom you'd particularly like to mention?

AY: Photographywise, I've been looking at a lot of the early modernists, people like László
Moh­­oly-Nagy. I got a book on the Russian avant-garde, and it's really sad because pretty much all of their lives ended in the '30s with Stalin. I've also been reading Crime and Punishment; lately I've been really interested in focusing on those aspects of my Russian heritage I'm proud of. I'm actually em­barrassed to tell people I'm Russian these days, because it's become such an awful place.

DL: It has kind of lost its identity, hasn't it?

AY: Yeah. Communism destroyed so many generations. I look at my grandparents and their generation, and it's as if their lives were taken from them. It's really sad and frightening that something like that could have happened. But I don't really think of myself as Russian anymore-I didn't even live there for that long.

DL: Russian blood still flows through your veins, though.