"I really love Bicycle Thief. That just reminds me of my relationship with my father. My mother — they were divorced and I was raised mostly by my father. We grew up really poor. Something about that film really strikes a chord in me real deep. I remember [when I first saw it],I think I was in college and I had just left home. It was part of film studies class. We were told to watch it and I remember getting really emotional watching it. I guess it just really struck a chord because it made me realize everything my father had gone through to support us and to be there for us. I just remember that relationship, that father/son relationship and him loving his father so much and the end — his father just constantly trying so hard to support the family and make ends meet, and really not being able to pull it off. Poverty sucks, you know what I mean? And then in the end, him having to kind of resort to something that goes completely against his character, really, in order to provide for his family. And those moments of just pure humiliation, as a man, to try to provide for your family. I remember times like that with my dad and it just really hit close to home. I remember missing my dad because I was in New York. I was away from home for the first time and getting a real clear idea of what my father had gone through to provide for me. I think when you’re in the day-to-day and living it, you don’t have that objectivity, and you’re not able to step back and see the big picture. Then sometimes these really great movies are able to that for you. They’re kind of able to strike these chords in you and illuminate things for you. I think that’s what the Bicycle Thief did for me."

"Mad Max. George Miller is my ultimate mentor. I went to see Fury Road 17 times in the cinemas. I can’t really express in one word of how good Mad Max 2 is. There’s hardly any dialogue in that movie, right? But the character stands out so much, visually, how he moves. Usually, you express through dialogue, but with George, it’s totally different. Like how a character throws a boomerang: No dialogue, but all character. I’m also influenced by where Geroge places the camera. It never goes away, far from Mel Gibson. Even looking through the telescope, usually the camera jumps to that location, but here you’re always looking at Max. It’s kind of basic, but George Miller keeps it basic in a way no one else can. It was tough when I had to leave my previous company. George came to Japan, and that was the first time we met. He cheered me up in my darkest time. After I became independent, and opened my studio, I went to Australia in 2017. I had two trailers at that time, but there was no gameplay revealed yet of Death Stranding. I explained what Death Stranding would be over an hour — the system, the story, the world. George told me, “What you’re doing is mathematically, philosophically, and physically correct.” He said: “Congratulations; it’s a guaranteed success.” George is a very kind gentleman. He is really into computer graphics and technology, and he also knows game technology. It’s really rare that a director of his generation knows all of these. He’s even older than me, but he has a lot of energy. There are game producers who are much older than me. But, as for creators who actually write scenarios or game designs, I think I’m the oldest in the industry. Sometimes I feel lonely because of that. But then there’s George; he’s over 70, and he’s still wearing this leather jacket, still young. That cheers me up."

"The thing about this band is that it came out of a grunge background, obviously Dave [Grohl] came out of Nirvana. But he can play guitar just as well or better than Kurt, sings great. The most interesting thing I find about Foo Fighters, and songs like 'My Hero', is that they are based in pop melodies. Not based in the blues. Which is really interesting, having that big wall of sound guitar thing with pop melodies and interesting lyrics. Just an interesting band. This album just has the songs and it has the attitude. You can have good songs on an album but... well I remember getting the Blur record [Blur] after hearing that 'Song 2' and I was shocked to find the rest of the record was just synths and stuff. What the fuck? You hear 'Song 2' and you think, 'Wow, that's great!' and then you hear the rest of the album and it's like REEEEOOW REEEOW. It's like The Communards or something. Almost disco electronica or something. So, you know, consistency is not just a big word like gymnasium, you want an album to make a statement song after song. Maybe the most consistent band is AC/DC. Song after song could almost be the same song. There is a great interview with Angus where a critic says, 'I don't want to insult you, but I think your new record sounded just like your last record', and Angus said: 'I don't agree. I think our new record sounds like every record we've ever made.' Sometimes the biggest criticism you can make can be the biggest compliment you can give. Colour is a consistent record. It makes one statement. So what that means is that they can take that music and play it live and it should sound similar to that record, consistent. I would include more if I could, but when you pick an album, it's not just a standalone item. It's about what's happening in your life, where you are and so on."

"Electric Ladyland actually would be a welcome album if it was a brand new band today. It still holds up. It was actually a pivotal record in the sense that you had a guitar player, perhaps the pre-eminent one of them all, who actually took chances in terms of songwriting. He also experimented with electronics, backing tapes and all that stuff. The reason that I know all of this is because the engineer and producer on that was a guy called Eddie Kramer who engineered some of the earlier Kiss records, and he would tell us stories and everything. A double album, it had lots of great guests on it like Dave Mason from Traffic and many others. 'Crosstown Traffic' is great, very unlike Jimi Hendrix. Noel Redding, the bass player actually auditioned as a guitar player and Hendrix told him, 'I'm actually looking for a bass player', so he had to switch over to bass right on the spot, which is why his bass playing, with a pick, is not the way that most bass players play. I was still in school when I heard it, I must have been 17 or so because I remember drawing the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the name and all that, on the cover of my notebook. In those days we used to buy albums sometimes just because of the album covers. There was an art to it, there were big hardcover books talking about the art and design of album covers and there were artists and companies like Hipgnosis and places like that which specialised in just creating album covers. For instance, on Love Gun we had a painter named Ken Kelly who painted the piece, and it was a lot of time and effort. It was an art, and sadly that's gone. Now the visuals are down to the size of a postage stamp, you don't get much. I didn't actually buy this one because of the cover. I'd bought Axis: Bold As Love because of the cover."

"Next choice I’d say would be The Gospel According to St. Matthew, by Pasolini. I saw that movie for the first time when I was 23 years old. I’d gone to church every Sunday and catechism every week for my whole childhood, but I never paid attention; I was always daydreaming in church — and all of a sudden I went to go see this movie, and I knew everything in the movie. I guess all of my Catholic upbringing I had absorbed through some sort of osmosis. Here was this movie which was this Biblical story which was told so beautifully: the cinema was so simple and so beautiful. He had, you know, Odetta playing “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” as the three wise men found Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus. It was, you know… I started sweating while I was watching the movie. The whole left side of my body went numb while I was watching, and I was sure that I was having a heart attack. It was all that I could do — you know, I didn’t want to because it was the greatest movie I’d ever seen — but it was all I could do to crawl out of the movie theater and knock on the projectionist’s door and ask him if I could call my girlfriend. I called my girlfriend and told her I thought I was dying, ’cause I was seeing the greatest movie I’d ever seen, and she showed up. I remember it had been snowing in Colorado and she had all this dirty snow on the roof of her car and I was eating all this dirty snow because my mouth was just parched. And I remember being in the emergency room and thinking that when the doctor walks through, if he looked like Jesus from The Gospel According to St. Matthew, I knew that meant I was dead. Fortunately the guy didn’t look anything like Jesus."