Games auteur Hideo Kojima talks Hollywood collaboration in Death Stranding panel

Norman Reedus (The Walking Dead), Guillermo Del Toro and now Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) are involved with Death Stranding, Kojima Productions' first project after breaking ties with its longtime publisher; at 2016's PlayStation Experience, Kojima reunited with Geoff Keighley, host at The Game Awards a few days earlier, to take a second look at his game's mysterious second trailer and a peek behind the scenes. 

One of the biggest games of coming years has got to be Death Stranding. 

Its director, Hideo Kojima, is best known for the "Metal Gear Solid" series and has long been ascribed auteur status for his use of cinematic techniques, impossibly convoluted storylines, highly detailed, high-concept worlds. 

Since Kiefer Sutherland's participation in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (2014) and a Guillermo del Toro/Norman Reedus partnership for cancelled horror Silent Hills, he has also been collaborating with high-profile film actors and producers. 

"I got his contact through my friend [and Drive director] Nicolas Winding Refn," Kojima said of Mikkelsen. "Longtime friend Guillermo del Toro gave me the contact for Norman Reedus." 

"[As creatives, Del Toro and I] would probably get into a fight if we tried to write the script together," Kojima continued. "Still, I asked him to perform in the game and he agreed." 

 

Kojima explained that Del Toro's face, body and movements were 3D scanned, while another actor will then come in for motion capture and voice recording. 

"I cannot take too much time from Guillermo – I want him to focus on his movies," said Kojima; Del Toro has TV series The Strain (which wrapped up season 3 in October) and Trollhunters awaiting debut, movies Hellboy 3 and Pinocchio announced, The Shape of Water wrapped and in post-production, and filming on Pacific Rim: Maelstrom underway. 

By contrast, Reedus and Mikkelsen will be doing motion capture and voice work for their parts, and though Kojima Productions was "not ready to announce that yet," there would be female characters. 

And Kojima, who loves stoking speculation about his games, as fan theories are formed, dissolved, and subsumed into greater hypotheses, said "it will take a while for us to release this game," – six years passed between Metal Gear Solid 4 and the first part of MGS V – "so in the meantime I want people to engage in their discussions. That's a game in itself." 

On-stage talk then shifted to the technology behind the game. Keighley reminded his audience that Death Stranding trailers were taken from a PlayStation 4 Pro running at 4k resolution, giving Kojima the opportunity to confirm an integrated game engine partnership with another Sony-published studio, the Netherlands' Guerilla Games (Killzone, the upcoming Horizon Zero Dawn.) 

And the fact that Guerilla's Herman Hulst was accompanied on stage by lead PlayStation 4 architect Mark Cerny only underlines the importance of Death Stranding to the PlayStation community as a whole. — AFP Relaxnews