IGN: News of a film adaptation of Death Stranding was announced a few hours before this interview. How did you come to work with Hammerstone Studios?
Kojima: I've been on video calls with a lot of people in Hollywood every week since last year, and not just for Death Stranding. I received a lot of offers, but my intention from the beginning was never to make a successful film. Alex Lebovici from Hammerstone Studios shared my take on this. There were a lot of pitches to make a full-scale movie with famous actors and flashy explosions, but what would the explosions in Death Stranding be for? Making money isn't something I focus on at all either. I'm aiming for a more arthouse look, and the only person who offered to make a film like that was Alex Lebovici, which makes me think he's of a rather unusual genre.
IGN: Have you made any decisions at this point about whether characters in the game, like Sam for example, will make an appearance?
Kojima: We haven't decided that yet. The failure of film adaptations of games for quite some time has led to a lot of movies that are aimed at gamers, right? That's why they have the same kind of look as a game. I don't want the movie Death Stranding to be like that. Instead, I take the approach of changing and evolving the world of Death Stranding in a way that suits cinema well. I made Death Stranding a game, and games are games. There is no real need to turn them into films. So in a way, the Death Stranding movie takes a direction that no one has tried before with a film adaptation of a game. I think what I need to do is something that will inspire some of the people who watch it to become creators in 10 or 20 years.
