Remember Speed Racer? The Wachowskis were the hottest thing in Hollywood after the Matrix films, and their next project, V for Vendetta (which they wrote and produced), only showed the world that they could do even more. Then came Speed Racer. It wasn't that the movie was terrible, it just...wasn't good. They took an awful script and gave it a high-shine VFX polish to no avail, but one happy coincidence that came out of Speed Racer was interest in collaborating with Rain, an unknown actor in the West who happens to be one of Korea's biggest pop stars.

While filming Speed Racer, Chad Stahelski, a stunt coordinator who had worked on the Matrix trilogy, was brought in to help choreograph a couple fight scenes, some of which involved Rain. The whole stunt team was impressed with this seemingly unknown guy (it wasn't until later that they found out how huge he is in Korea). From there, things just kind of rolled in the right direction for Ninja Assassin. As Stahelski put it, "We always kind of had a running joke with the Wachowski brothers about making a kickass ninja movie. We told them we found our ninja, and brought Rain in to do a fight sequence for him...and everyone was like 'Holy s***! This guy is good!'" Only a few months later, production was in motion on that "running joke," Ninja Assassin.