I started to go see foreign movies from 5th grade, and always bought…

“I love museums, so I go every week. ... I go straight to the gift shop, buy these items, and read them at cafes. ... I love Buddhist statues too, so I buy the catalogs. ... postcards and plastic file folders. I sort of collect them”

“The first one I bought myself was for "The Towering Inferno." ... he said "Hideo, you don't need it. I've already got one." I didn't want to share it, and it made me angry ... So, I stopped going to the movies with my brother. I went alone and bought the pamphlet by myself.”

“It was during that time that my parents introduced a family tradition: every night we would all watch a film together. I wasn't allowed to go to bed till the film had finished: the opposite of how it is for most children.”

At 43, Kojima ranked his three vital cultural nutrients as movies, music, and novels. His father loved movies, so Kojima was made to absorb films from the time he began forming memories, and music came along with those viewings; by contrast, although the family home was filled with books and his parents placed children's classics on his desk to tempt him, he still did not read even by the end of elementary school.

“Ever since middle school or thereabouts, for the longest time, I had wanted to make movies.”