That's the worst thing for an actor: when you say to someone, "Yeah, I was in that movie," and they say, "You were?"
It's not whether you fall or make a mistake, it's what you do when you fall. And I say you stand up. You keep standing up. It's not how many times you fall, it's how many times you stand up.
I was clear: "I don't want to play businessmen with bifocal glasses and cameras, so if you're going to give me an Asian bad guy to play, then I'm going to give you the baddest Asian bad guy you've ever seen, and you're not going to forget that I was in the film."
Nature is a big part of my weekend. Whenever possible, I take Friday and Monday off and spend four days outdoors. We should remind ourselves that there was something here before us, a force more powerful than us.
You can't just replace someone with a regular-looking guy who didn't say any of the lines.
I really believe that breath, in and of itself can become the ultimate self-healing tool.
I used to be a street performer, and performances on Venice Beach, it's like playing the Apollo: They let you know if they don't like you!
Kids keep getting wiser younger, which is dangerous, and adults need to stop taking themselves too seriously.
Bruce Lee was the first guy to bring film recognition of Asian men not being wimps, so it made me want to be as powerful as he was.
I don't know if many people realize that Dolph Lundgren is a chemical engineer. He's not a dumb blond guy. This guy is smart and he's a martial artist.
I'm not a method actor, I don't write my character's history or all those kinds of things. I'm more about the 90 percent of the brain that is subconscious. I like to just pick certain pieces, let it soak in, and then let it kind of emerge out.
Looking back at my career, if there's one word that most people use to describe me, it's intense.
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.
In every aspect of society, including business and anywhere that creativity can be used, we can be - or we used to be, anyway - the most innovative country, because we weren't restricted by artificial limitations. We are made to be wild, free, and creative, and this clearly was a symbol of that kind of energy in America.
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.
Native Americans say, "It's a good day to die," and samurai live their life to die honorably, so that kind of energy creates a certain mindset of reactiveness with control to a point. And after that, it's gone.
Americans really don't understand the Japanese nature, but it's not an easy thing to understand.
I've been in a lot of cult movies, but I've been very fortunate to have been involved in projects that people remember.
I have to humbly say people really like the bad guys.
In Hawaii, there are 50-year-old grandfathers, because they got married so early.
The power and depth of Japanese acting certainly inspired me, so I was determined that Hollywood was going to get a taste of that, that Americans were going to get a taste of Japanese action.
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.
American comedies about Asians have never been funny to me. That always kind of pissed me off.
Playing Japanese characters and being in environments that are Japanese, like a character's apartment or whatever, if you have directors or art directors who just don't know what' s what with Japanese culture, then pretty soon something's just passed through. I've been through many times where I've pointed out the incorrectness of so much of what's been done to a set.
There were times when I purposely didn't go to school because of Pearl Harbor Day, because certainly there was enough media about it every year to remind everybody. So when I heard they were going to make the movie, I thought, "Oh, no, please not another Pearl Harbor mention!"
