“It instantly made me a fan of Diane Lane. There was a time when I would watch its ending every morning.”
About Streets of Fire (1984): Kojima says it instantly made him a fan of Diane Lane, and there was a time when he would watch its ending every morning.
“It resonated with me, given the loneliness that troubled me in my younger days, which is why it has a very special place in my heart. After I saw it I bought a jacket and a pair of boots to copy Robert De Niro. Needless to say, I did not get a mohawk.”
“I was roaming in the dark and you were like the beacon of light leading the way with your smile and everything.”
After returning to Japan following the freight-elevator incident, Kojima bought the DVD of Elevator to the Gallows and watched it for the first time in about forty years. The film proved different from his childhood impressions: he felt sympathy for Jeanne Moreau and realized it was not film noir to him but a hymn to love. He concluded that he had been trapped inside that movie for decades and that the real elevator accident had set in motion again the elevator that had long stood still in his heart.
After leaving that screening into the warm rain of Shinjuku, Kojima saw skyscrapers and neon signs in various languages, heard sirens and foreign voices, and for a moment felt he was in the Los Angeles of 2019 imagined by Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott. He said he smelled Blade Runner in the air, touched it in the city, and felt it on his skin and in the warmth of a puddle.
“And so, just in case Death Stranding became my last work, I wanted Lindsay to be a part of it.”