Travis [Bickle] was the same as me in a way. I'm Japanese; I thought…

“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.”

Every time Kojima got into a taxi, he looked at the driver’s name on their ID as if somewhere he were still searching for Travis Bickle. He never found that name in real life, but he wished that someday he could sit in the rear seat and thank Travis Bickle because, unlike the movie’s rescue of fourteen-year-old Iris, Travis had pulled Kojima out of his isolation.

Taxi Driver did not teach Kojima to defeat his loneliness but to live with it, because it showed him that someone else could feel the same way. Decades later he believed that that emotional sickness had vanished around the birth of his first child and when he began making video games: upon realizing his works connected him with faceless, nameless players around the world, the loneliness fell away definitively.

“I was roaming in the dark and you were like the beacon of light leading the way with your smile and everything.”

Asked by GQ, Kojima named as his four favorite films 2001: A Space Odyssey, Taxi Driver, Mad Max 2 and High and Low, although he clarified that his top four changes all the time.