I'll be honest, I never saw myself making a ninja movie, never entertained the idea. I think ninja films can be quite cheesy unless you do them in feudal Japan.

It was weird working with all of them - Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris. There's a sequence in the movie where myself and Jean-Claude Van Damme are running through this airport and there's this silhouette behind this big screen - it smashes, and there you see Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Bruce Willis all firing their weapons at me and Jean-Claude. It's kind of surreal when you think about it, the three '80s icons of action movies, unloading as many bullets as they could at us. It's pretty crazy.

Im always trying to improve my skills as an actor. I think it shows in El Gringo; it shows in the new Universal Soldier. You cant rest on your laurels; youve got to keep improving.

I put so much pressure on myself to raise the bar with each and every project. I treat it like every film is my last, and I make sure I pour everything I have into every film I make because if I'm not trying to improve, someone else will.

I prefer to play the villain or the antihero.

I did martial arts since I was 10 years old, and I've got as much love for the movies as I have for martial arts, so when I was 18 years old, I started studying performing arts with the eye of getting into the film industry and went to drama school after that.

The genre of '80s action movies, I think, changed really when The Matrix came out and Keanu Reeves was able to perform kung fu. Then you had Matt Damon in the Bourne films, doing a great job. So it's different now, they can train actors to do their own fights convincingly on screen, so those guys aren't needed anymore. But I think everything goes around in circles; people still do want to see the guys that can do stuff for real, that's why The Expendables is so popular. I think it will come back again.