Hiroyuki Sanada Talks Bullet Train, John Wick 4, and Sonny Chiba

With director David Leitch’s fantastic new movie, Bullet Train, opening in theaters later this week, I recently got to speak with Hiroyuki Sanada about making the action-thriller. During the interview, he talked about why he wanted to be part of Bullet Train, how they filmed most of the movie on a soundstage on the Sony backlot (you won’t believe it after you see the film), what it was like working with Sonny Chiba early in his career, and his role and character in John Wick 4. If you haven’t seen the trailers, Bullet Train was adapted from the Japanese mystery-fiction book Bullet Train written by Kōtarō Isaka, the Japanese best-selling and award-winning novelist. Just like the novel, the movie takes place in Japan on the titular bullet train on a trip from Tokyo to Morioka. On the train there are a number of assassins whose assignments are very much interconnected, though they don’t know this until things start to go haywire when the assassins start trying to kill each other. Loaded w