James Saito, who played Kendo, couldn't actually speak Japanese. He fooled the entire crew for the first three weeks. During an interview with Outside magazine in 2016, he said, "At the audition, they asked me if I could speak Japanese. I don't speak any of it, but all the guys at the table were white guys, so I thought they'd never know the difference. I just said any household words in Japanese that I knew from growing up. When I got the part, I had a friend translate my lines. But during the course of the shooting, my part got bigger, and so the director would say, 'Jimmy, can you say this?' And I'd go, 'Uh, yeah, sure. When are we gonna shoot?' And they'd say, 'About 30 minutes.' So I'd ski down to the lodge and call my friend. Every day I had like three Japanese-English dictionaries in my pockets and a whole list of things to say."