Hideo Kojima's 4 Favorite Movies Are All Bangers

Anyone who's played a game from acclaimed Japanese video game designer Hideo Kojima can tell he's a big fan of movies. His games, like the "Metal Gear" series and "Death Stranding," are well known for being deeply cinematic with wildly complex plots, and he's gotten some pretty famous movie-makers to take on roles in them. In fact, "Death Stranding" features not only actors Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, Margaret Qualley, and Léa Seydoux, but it also includes vocal and motion-capture performances by directors Nicolas Winding Refn and Guillermo del Toro. Now, with Kojima and A24 now in the process of turning "Death Stranding" into an actual movie, it seems prudent to look into the impressive creative's favorite films.

Recently, Kojima has both visited the Criterion closet to discuss some of his favorite films and been asked about his favorite four movies by GQ, and while there's a tiny bit of overlap, his top four for GQ are all absolute bangers. (The Criterion picks are also pretty great, as he essentially turns it into a lesson in 1950s and 1960s Japanese cinema!) It makes sense that Kojima would have great taste in movies based on the cinematic influences in his games and his killer taste in actors, but it's still neat to learn exactly which movies matter to him the most.

When asked by GQ to name his Letterboxd top four films, Kojima revealed that he didn't have Letterboxd yet but was now interested, especially when he learned directing legend Martin Scorsese has an account. "If Scorsese's doing it, I can't criticize Scorsese. He's the second god. The first is George Miller," Kojima noted. He went on to explain that he actually keeps a movie tracking list on his phone similar to what Letterboxd does, with different emojis for the films he's watched with his sons or his infamous "no comment" negative non-reviews that fans go wild for on social media.

While he admitted that his top four changes "all the time," which is wildly relatable, he told GQ that at the time of the interview they were Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," Akira Kurosawa's "High and Low," Miller's "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior," and Scorsese's "Taxi Driver." You can really see the influence of "2001" on Kojima's visuals, especially in "Death Stranding," and there are definitely elements of "Mad Max" in that post-apocalyptic tale. Each of the movies is among the most well-known for their directors, save for "High and Low," which often gets ignored in favor of Kurosawa's operatic samurai films like "Yojimbo," "Seven Samurai," and "Ran." (It did make our list of Kurosawa's best 11 movies, however!)

"High and Low" is a bit different from Kurosawa's samurai films, as it's a complicated crime film about a kidnapping gone awry. It stars frequent Kurosawa collaborator Toshirô Mifune as a wealthy businessman who believes his son has been kidnapped for a ransom, only to discover his chauffeur's son was kidnapped instead. The kidnapper still intends on killing the child if the businessman doesn't pay, leading to a complex moral quandary. "High and Low" is a tense police procedural with characters who are neither purely good nor evil, instead portraying them in the shades of gray they tend to be closer to in reality. The literal shades of gray in the movie are broken by one shot that includes pink smoke, which was a pretty majestic feat in 1963. Indeed, "High and Low" features some truly spectacular cinematography in general.

In the Criterion Closet, Kojima was excited to see that "High and Low" is in the collection, and he was even more excited to be able to take a copy home, referring to it as his favorite Kurosawa film. You can see some of the influence of "High and Low" in Kojima's work, both in terms of shot composition and writing, as Kojima's characters are usually all kinds of morally compromised. So, while his favorite films might change all the time, these four are serious bangers.