David Morse and Bruce Willis have a good reason to propose a toast with the release of their new action-thriller "16 Blocks" -- the film brings them back to a city where it all began for the actors a quarter of a century earlier.

"We were starting out in New York about the same time -- he was bartending at Café Central and I was bartending at a place called Marvin Gardens -- we've had a similar journey as actors," Morse recalled for me in a recent @ The Movies interview.

The funny thing is, Morse's encounters with Willis in the early days were all happenstance.

"I didn't actually know him, but I'd go into Café Central and just turned out that he was bartending," Morse said.

But just because they weren't buddies all those years ago doesn't make the reunion of the two actors, who both worked on "Twelve Monkeys" in 1995, less relevant.

"To get to see people over the course of our lives and careers, it's very moving to me and I'm very grateful that we're all able to still be working," Morse said. "The thing that's best about it, is that we're all still the same actors that we started out as 25 years ago in New York."

Appropriately, "16 Blocks" is a New York story, told in 110 consecutive New York minutes. Morse plays Frank Nugent, a corrupt New York police detective who aims to silence Eddie Bunker (Mos Def), a petty criminal on his way to becoming a grand jury witness in a case that promises to bring Nugent and his team down. In Nugent's way, though, is his former partner Jack Mosley (Bruce Willis), now a broken-down man who's assigned to escort Eddie 16 blocks from jail to the courthouse.

Most actors will tell you that playing "the bad guy" is an opportunity they relish, as they get a chance to explore the dark side of a character. But that's when a "bad guy" is defined as such.

Morse's character, on the other hand, can't so easily be stereotyped. "There's no clear-cut bad guy or good guy in the movie," Morse explained. "If you wanted to point the finger at somebody and say, 'That's the bad guy,' that would be at me.

"But in playing it, that's not what I'm doing. I'm not playing a bad guy. I'm playing a guy who has had a relationship Bruce Willis' character," Morse added. "We've known each other forever and have cared about each other forever. We've been partners forever and know everything about each other -- and suddenly we wake up one day and we're on the opposite sides of a life-or-death situation. That to me is a really compelling reason to do a movie."

Another compelling reason for Morse to do "16 Blocks" was that it gave him the chance to work again with director Richard Donner, who cast the actor in his film debut, "Inside Moves," in 1980. And while it's been quite a long time since the two have worked together, Morse said it was worth the wait.

"When I first got the script, I wasn't sure I wanted to do it," Morse said. "But then I saw that Dick Donner was directing it. I was dying to do another film together. It had been 25 years -- that's a little too long of a stretch. But Dick called me and said to me, 'Don't do this because I would like you to do it and because of our relationship. Do it because you believe in it. And I have to say, what was in the script I believed in. It was worth doing it."

Anyone who's familiar with such Donner classics as the first "Superman" and the "Lethal Weapon" movies knows that the filmmaker has a penchant for creating thrilling action sequences. But what Morse loves about the director, is that the characters aren't lost within them.

"His sense of truth and his of sense of loyalty to the characters, not wanting to betray them to the action or plot, is the most important thing to him," Morse observed. "That's a hard lesson to learn for filmmakers. You see a lot of films now, where guys coming out of commercials or videos, they're so young and overwhelmed by the technical part of moviemaking and the action part of it, that other things suffer. Dick is smart enough that it all comes from the character. And '16 Blocks' is a much better film for that."

And while Morse absorbs the experience of Donner, Willis and several other co-stars, that's not to say he's above learning things from the relative newcomers on the set -- and in the case of "16 Blocks," he was fascinated by rap star/actor Mos Def.

"He's done a lot of work as a musician and a poet, but sometimes when you watch people who have only done three or four movies like Mos -- you can learn as much from them as you can learn from somebody like Anthony Hopkins (Morse's co-star in "Hearts in Atlantis"), who's been doing it forever."

For Morse, who has also starred in several films including "Contact," "The Rock," "The Green Mile" and the recent "Dreamer," acting is continual learning process. And thanks to the diversity of talented performers with whom he works, Morse said that he wouldn't have it any other way.

"There are a lot of people who have just studied acting and have a process that they go to, to do their work. If that helps them do their work, great," Morse said. "But then there are some people who don't have any process at all, like Björk, who I did 'Dancer in the Dark' with. She has no process, she's just alive -- and that's what we all want to be, alive in front of the camera."