I was excited about working with Richard Gere. Oh, and Joan Allen! Oh, my God, she is such a force of nature, it's mind boggling.

There's one thing about weights with action movies: Once your muscles get that tight, it's sometimes hard to stop your movement, especially if you're trying to move with some strength, and with the swords in the film.

Americans really don't understand the Japanese nature, but it's not an easy thing to understand.

When you start working on a series, it's almost too much work. It's like a movie a week.

The power of Hollywood, as we know, is that it can create these images in people's minds, and they live with those images for their whole life.

I have to humbly say people really like the bad guys.

Before I started studying martial arts, I had temper problems. I could definitely fly off the handle. Being raised in the south in 1956 definitely gave me some memories to latch onto for negative emotions.