Question: I imagine after 'World Trade Center' people would come up to you and talk about their stories of September 11^th. Was there anything about doing that movie that moved you?

Pena: The thing that moved me was at the premiere for 'World Trade Center,' I don't know if I'm ever going to have this again in my life – I hope I do – but after the premiere there were cops and fireman that just wanted to shake my hand. They said that they were caught up in the movie and they said that we did right by them. I mean, that's the best acknowledgement that you can get, when there seemed to be all these people that are actually putting their life on the line in order to protect and serve, and these guys did above and beyond that on that particular day. That's one of those things that I'm always going to remember, them telling me that.

Question: Do you want to direct?

Pena: I think so.

Question: You want to do that and eventually produce your own films?

Pena: I think so. I think that directing is something that I'm going to lean towards. There is still a lot of work to be done as far as even me as an actor, to see how I can tell a story in the best way, how to fit into a story, how to tell a story, how to make it fun for me as well and working with actors and the light and the camera angles, why this angle is picked instead of that angle. Without getting overly heady about it, you have to know how to put the audience's attention to where it should be at that point in a story. So I have a little bit of work to do, maybe five years.

Question: What was the glacier experience like for you in this film?

Pena: Awesome. You're going up in a chopper for half an hour into Whistler and you're thinking that it's beautiful; it's amazing, 'Look at those trees.' You think it's really cool and then you get into costume or whatever and they dump you off on the glacier and you think that it's really cool and that the view is fantastic or whatever, and two hours later you're like, 'It's cold. I want to go home.'

Question: So no falls or injuries up there?

Pena: No, but they made me walk – it's in the movie – down a mountain and then up a mountain.

Question: You did that?

Pena: That's what I asked. I had a metal plate on because there was no way to not have it on and it was a walk – you saw it. It was a good walk.

Question: They couldn't give you a fake metal plate?

Pena: Well, you had to drop it as well onto the ground and if it was fake one it wouldn't have been right. It needed to stick like you saw. If it was plastic it wouldn't have been right. It would've rolled off the toboggan. 

Question: You seem to be really committed to doing good stories with good people. After getting a lot of attention after 'World Trade Center' did you get flooded with scripts that weren't what you wanted to do and have to resist some temptation there?

Pena: It's kind of been the same thing. There's always been the opportunity to audition for things, but now there seems to be a little more interest in it. I'm just following the same kind of formula. Do I like the script? When I read it in my apartment by myself, just me, how do I feel about the story? It's really easy. If after page twenty you're on the internet then there's something wrong, but if it's three o'clock in the morning and you're on page eighty and you really want to finish those last forty pages there is something to be said about that. So it's going to be the same for a while.

Question: You auditioned for this one, right?

Pena: I did.

Question: Mark said he knew you were right the minute you auditioned. Did you get that feeling?

Pena: I did. At first I didn't know because of the genre and because it was so different I wondered if I could do something like this. I'm used to dealing in relationships and working with Maggie Gyllenhaal and us being husband and wife. It was rewarding as hell and so I didn't know how I would do it, but it was funny, I was taking a jog one day and I was just thinking about the character and I thought, 'Oh, I got it.' I went to that meeting and setup an audition and Antoine offered it to me in the room. He was like, 'You want to do the movie?' I was like, 'Lets do it.' It's funny though, you have to connect with it somehow and you have to work for that connection. In essence you want to try and make it look as easy as possible, but there is a lot of research that goes into that. So I did have a connection. You hear about certain movies or whatever, but from the get go it was refreshing because Antoine actually cared about the characters and the story and he wanted it to be as honest as possible. He was like, 'I just want to be real with it. I don't want any of that fake stuff.' I kind of like that especially in an action movie. There are scenes where Mark is trying to cover that wound that other directors might not have shot it so honestly. They might have faded away from that because people might not want to see it, but it was cool watching someone actually trying to deal with it in a way and not think of censoring themselves.

Question: Was it fun? It looked like it was fun playing Army.

Pena: It is fun. It's the kind of thing that you're not really ready for, but if someone were to give you a gun and tell you to shoot this thing, run around the block and shoot that other thing and then there's going to be a helicopter above you, shoot that too – you get into the spirit of that pretty quickly. So it was a lot of fun. That was surprising because I had never done any of that stuff before. So I was totally willing to do that.