Hideo Kojima isn’t shy about his love for movies. The creator behind games like Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding even wanted to make movies before becoming a game developer, and his games often pay homage to some of his favorites. Even Snake, the main character of the Metal Gear Franchise, is named after Escape from New York’s protagonist, Snake Plissken. He famously goes out of his way to inject cinematic sensibilities into his works and loves working with big-name actors. The man just loves movies.
Criterion, the organization behind the Criterion Collection, invited Hideo Kojima to do a video in its ‘Closet Picks’ series on its YouTube channel. The series is dedicated to highlighting notable voices in creative industries where a selected luminary picks their favorites from the “Criterion Closet,” which is exactly what it sounds like; a closet containing physical copies of each film in the Criterion Collection.
In the video, Kojima looks like a kid in a candy store. “It’s like being in heaven,” he says, before bemoaning the lack of movies from the ’50s and ’60s on streaming services. He goes on to discuss how he usually buys physical copies of his favorites from that time through Criterion because it’s the only place he can find physical prints of some of his favorite classics.
Here are Kojima’s picks:
High and Low
Before picking High and Low (1963), Kojima introduced this police procedural-meets-domestic-drama as his favorite among director Akira Kurosawa’s other, more popular works like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. The Death Stranding director said, “I love High and Low the most. I was so shocked when I saw this, so I’d love for you to watch it.”
Late Spring
“Now, where there’s Akira Kurosawa, there’s Yasujiro Ozu.” Kojima introduced Yasujiro Ozu alongside his more globally known counterpart. His first pick, Late Spring, is a story about a widower and his daughter set in postwar Japan.
Tokyo Twillight
The second picture from Yasujiro Ozu to go into Kojima’s bag is an obscure selection that’s part of a posthumous anthology of Ozu’s films. He mentions its different tone from other Ozu films, “Ozu films are usually very light, but this one is really dark. I really like that about this film so I highly recommend it.”
Ugetsu
Kojima was very visibly happy to be in good company with this one. Martin Scorsese helped to restore Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1953 classic about the ravages of war. “This scared me as a kid,” he says laughing into the camera, “It’s got ghosts in it. It’s a black-and-white film, but it’s a beautiful film.”
Kwaidan
He said, “They have my favorite. By Masaki Kobayashi. Kwaidan.” This series of stylized, artsy ghost stories from 1965 also scared Kojima as a kid, and are based on stories from Japanese folklore.
Harakiri
Another Kobayashi joint, Kojima lauds this influential, award winning samurai flick before diving into its influence on the Spaghetti Westerns that started popping up later on in the 1960s.
Jigoku
Another horror film, this time by Nobuo Nakagawa, Jigoku (also known as Hell or the Sinners of Hell) puts a student through–well–Hell. The Metal Gear creator talked about how another of Nakagawa’s horror films, The Ghost of Yotsuya, led him to finding the much more surreal Jigoku.
Onibaba
“Again, I watched this at night as a kid and it shocked me,” he said, before he recalled discussing Kaneto Shindo’s folk-horror set in medieval Japan with Guillermo Del Toro when they met for the first time. He added, “He loves this film as well. There’s a monster called Onibaba in Pacific Rim.”
Woman in the Dunes
Kojima got discovered Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1960 art-house darling after reading Kobo Abe’s book (also called Woman in the Dunes).
If you’d like to watch the full video–and watch Kojima light up as he talks about some of his favorite Japanese movies–check it out on Criterion’s YouTube channel.
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