"THU Storytelling 2025" Hideo Kojima's Concerns Over the Disappearance of "Storytellers" [CINEMORE ACADEMY Vol.40]

There were no textbooks on The Game development.

Q: Director Kojima, you have absorbed a huge number of novels and films, but when you output your work, do you combine the best parts of each?

Kojima: It depends on the medium I'm using to output my work. When I write a novel, I use the advantages of novels to express emotions through words, but when it comes to a screenplay, it's almost entirely dialogue. If I don't want to express something through dialogue, I use images. I also use music and other things I've seen and read, things I've accumulated. However, in my case, my output is The Game, so there are a lot of things I can't use as is. I didn't grow up playing The Game, so there are no textbooks on The Game. But now there are textbooks on The Game development. That's why young people don't create new things.

Q: It seems like a lot of people start by looking for references.

Kojima: We're now in the Google generation, so we search for everything. For example, if I tell a staff member, "I want you to watch a certain movie scene for reference," many of them will search for just that scene on YouTube and watch it. Watching the whole movie can give you a different impression of a scene, but... That being said, that era is no longer here. With the advent of AI, this trend will only accelerate, and I wonder if the day will come when stories themselves will no longer exist.

Q: How do you create the characters that drive the story?

Kojima: Characters are the most important thing. First, we decide their role in the story. The main character was born like this and has lived this kind of life. That's why they act like this, and we work out every last detail. We do that thoroughly. Then, mysteriously, the characters start speaking on their own. After that, once we've cast the actors, we change the details one after another. Because it's digital, details are constantly being overwritten. That may be different from film. To put it in extreme terms, I think any story can be made as long as there's a worldview and the characters are appealing and rooted within it.

"Storytellers" are becoming less and less present