What type of research did you do for this role?
I used to live in Los Angeles and I still keep a house here. I’m actually a filmmaker, I go back and forth. So basically Omura’s character is some kind of extension of myself. I also researched that period – the 1870s – as a filmmaker. I always wanted to make those movies.
This Omura character is an amalgam of several people who [were] dispatched by the government for the first time to see Europe and the States. There were about 30 or 40 characters, and I was always fascinated with the experience of those people. There are so many books written about them... I read those and put them together. That’s actually what Ed [Zwick] wanted me to do. The great characters from the Meiji era I had heard from my grandfather. My grandfather’s last name was, just by coincidence, Omura. Before I was cast, this Omura character was Priest Omura. When Ed got me, for some reason I lost the title Priest, but instead I got the first name. So I asked Ed, “Can I use my grandfather’s name?” And he accepted it, so I’m playing my grandfather’s name (laughing).
Do you think this movie stays real faithful to the culture?
Oh yes, particularly in the area of the manner of the courtroom – the Emperor’s Courtroom. It’s very faithful to that era. For samurai descriptions and samurai villages and that sort of stuff, it was a little bit of an exaggeration of going into sort of halfway into Hollywood style. But Kurosawa always did that. He researched a lot and then using all those research pieces as a base, and then sort of using poetic justice to go a little bit farther. And Ed is inheriting such a kind of technique from Kurosawa. We were really impressed by Ed’s approach to every aspect of the film.
Your character could be viewed as the villain in “The Last Samurai.” Do you see him that way?
Yes, yes. I wanted to do a ‘villain’ character but Ed prohibited me to do any of those facial expressions. So I sort of played it a little bit less, but it was fun.
TIMOTHY SPALL ('Graham'):
You play Tom Cruise’s interpreter. How did you learn enough of the Japanese language to do this role?
I had to do a lot of hard work and listen to lots of tapes and learn the language. I didn’t try and learn the whole language, I just learned all of the individual pieces of Japanese that I had to do by listening to tapes and piecing them together, listening to an actor each syllable by syllable, then put a sentence together and another sentence and another sentence… Then I was finished. Like a parrot would, really.
How long did that take you?
[My wife] had to listen to me do it down corridors in hotels, waking up speaking Japanese, going to sleep speaking Japanese – long enough.
Do you still do that in your sleep?
No, I forgot it. The funny thing is, I had this thing where if I have a difficult part with lots of lines, as soon as I finish I forget it. When I went to see a screening of it, it came back to me. But I just wipe it in my mind.
Your character is also a photographer. How tough was it working with that old camera?
Well it was a little bit elaborate but then again, a prop is a prop and you have to make it look like you know what you’re doing. I’ve played a photographer before in another film so I kind of [knew what to do].
I heard you've said it was extremely difficult to speak Japanese and use the camera at the same time.
It comes under the old heading of “being able to say a speech without bumping into the furniture is the secret of acting.” It just gets more elaborate when you’ve got more props.
Was it the Japanese culture that attracted you to the movie in the first place?
When I read the script, I just thought it was a fantastic combination of everything. It’s a personal journey of a desolate guy who finds himself; it’s the joining of two cultures, two diverse cultures. It’s historically very interesting because it’s about the point where Japan decided to open its borders and become an imperial power. That was in 1876, by 1920 they were ruling the other half of the world. We know what history tells us about what happened in 1945. It’s incredibly interesting journal of what happened historically, and a marvelous story about one man’s journey from one culture into another – understanding and coming to terms with himself and that culture.
More interviews from the U.S. Premiere of "The Last Samurai:"
Tom Cruise, Ken Watanabe and Shin Koyamada, Tony Goldwyn and Ngila Dickson, and Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz
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"The Last Samurai" Premiere Photos
"The Last Samurai" Production Photos
"The Last Samurai" Trailer, Credits, Costumes, and Movie News
