“Cinema, on the other hand, has a live quality. There's not much you can do about the weather on a given day, or the interplay of light and shadow at a certain time. And that's what I love about it, the way a cohesive work is stitched together from moment to moment.”
In 1999 Kojima explained that games and anime are alike in that everyone and everything is created from one’s own imagination and, if something does not please you, you can easily change it; by contrast, he said, cinema has a live quality—you cannot do much about the weather on a given day or the interplay of light and shadow at a certain time—and that is precisely what he loves about it, how a cohesive work is stitched together from moment to moment. He added that in cinema, if you do not like a scene you are stuck with it, but in games you can always rework something, which is why game development can become neverending: what you did today may not please you tomorrow morning.
“But with games you can always rework something. Which is why game development can become neverending. (laughs)”