#acting process

This film is a celebration of Anton Yelchin’s life, but the knowledge of his death certainly haunts the film. How early on in the process did you decide to not focus on his death until the closing minutes? Garret Price: From the beginning. As I started digging in and learning about him, then talking to everybody, I knew this was a movie about life and how short it is. To me, the death is part of the story, but it’s not what the story is.

I didn’t know Anton, so I was learning about him as I was making this film, and I had to start at the beginning to understand who he was. There were surprises around every corner for me and I wanted to reflect those surprises in the film itself, for people who don’t know much about him, and add layers to somebody who’s already a layered individual.

What do you think it was about Anton that made him stand out in his generation as an actor so uniquely identifiable? As you say, he’s a generational talent. I don’t think you can say he’s just a natural performer. He put the work in. He just studied everything. Anyone that has a creative bone in their body can relate to him and will be inspired to do more like he did.

Also, he never wanted to be the star. He would just be at peace with it all. He was always looking under the hood, constantly talking to the production assistants, the gaffers, the directors of photography, the first assistants. He learned a lot on set.

In the film, Anton rants to his camera about how “you don’t get to make the cinema you want to make”. Is this a sentiment you largely agree with? Yep. Though for him, I don’t think it was necessarily a ‘one for me, one for them’ type thing. He loved making movies. A lot of those bigger films he made did afford him to take more risky projects that were personal, but at the same time it’s tough when you’re putting all this work in and no-one’s seeing it, or it gets bad reviews. It’s gonna eat you alive inside a little bit.

That’s what I loved when we got Willem Dafoe talking about him, because they’re very similar. Willem shared the same feelings, about how just because you take the road less travelled doesn’t mean it’s the road to travel. I think it’s a perfect way to sum up the feelings Anton felt about his choice of projects.

Along with his provocative photography hobby, he was starting to choose melancholic, seedier projects such as Only Lovers Left Alive and Green Room. What do you think drew Anton to the darker side of life? He loved people of all walks of life. He just really latched onto all of the stories and he wanted to find a way to express them. So many people I’ve talked to in this process, especially his friends, would tell me how he would just stop to talk to anyone in the street and ask them questions. He was so present and such a listener.

It’s something about the people’s stories that you don’t get to hear about that he was drawn to, and one way of getting closer to them was the photography. He was taking photographs his whole life but never considered himself a photographer, just like he never considered himself a musician. It was just another outlet for him to express himself.

I assume you watched all of his films. Which was the most impressive of Anton’s performances for you? The one that gutted me the most was Alpha Dog. It’s such an amazing performance. He was fifteen years old at the time and in the documentary we show Anton getting drunk and filming himself to prepare for that role. I was like “wow”.

He was having these life experiences, like getting drunk or having his first kiss on set. He’s a coming-of-age story through the love of making movies and that really interested me. For me, Green Room was showing who he would become as an actor in the years to come. It breaks my heart he couldn’t do that. Also: don’t tell Drake I chose Green Room.

Do you know if there are intentions to complete Anton’s Travis film? Would that simply be too personal for anyone to take over? It’s only 50 pages long and the rest of the movie is in Anton’s head, so he’s the only person who could finish it. Everything he ever did in this business was leading up to directing and if he were alive today he would already have done twenty more movies. He was so prolific.

The late Anton Yelchin, subject of ‘Love, Antosha’.

These types of home-video documentaries should become easier to make with the advent of constant cell-phone footage. But on the other hand, I can’t imagine it having the same warmth as the physical video of the 1990s and early 2000s. How do you feel about the way technology shifts the feel of footage after a certain point in time? I think now, with cellphones, people are always performing, so it doesn’t feel real and authentic compared to the footage I’ve had to work on, even from fifteen to twenty years ago. There’s much more of an emotional connection to these home videos, and not just of Anton, of all of us.

There’s too much narcissism now with selfies and stuff like that. It was a different time with more true-to-life moments. You couldn’t just delete something and do it over and over again until it’s perfect. You weren’t meant to do that, and that’s the beauty of it. I can’t imagine making a portrait-type movie for this generation with the same emotion.

Do you intend to make fiction films or remain a documentarian? I’m an editor by trade. I probably do more fiction than I do documentaries. I’ve been working as a film and TV editor for fifteen years and I go back and forth. I actually think they inform each other, and that freedom is making me a stronger filmmaker.

A lot of fiction films are becoming more documentary-esque, and documentaries are becoming more like fiction films. People like to pigeon-hole certain types of filmmakers and that’s crazy; it’s all storytelling.

What was the film that made you want to make films? That’s tough. Almost Famous was the one that made me think ‘I wanna make movies’. I think that’s my favorite movie of all time. It has everything I like about filmmaking.