During the 2022 Gamescom event, the popular game creator Hideo Kojima announced that he was starting a podcast. The first episode of Brain Structure premiered on September 8, 2022, exclusively on Spotify. With a couple of episodes under his belt, Kojima is ready to bring on his first guest of the series so far, and it’s an exciting announcement! Today on Twitter, Kojima let us all know that the director Mamoru Oshii will be joining him for episode three coming out tomorrow.
Mamoru Oshii is the director behind several popular anime movies, including the 1995 Ghost in the Shell. His work has been described as philosophy-oriented storytelling, where he focuses first on the visuals as the most important, Story and characters come later in terms of importance for him, so his movies are very different from a lot of Hollywood movies that follow a character-based storytelling formula.
He will make a great guest for Hideo Kojima to chat with! Kojima’s Twitter bio says, “My body is made up of 70% movies,” a play on the fact that humans are 70% or so water. And in the Twitter announcement, Kojima describes both of them as “cinephiles,” so we’re sure he’s excited to chat movies with a legendary director. You can see the Tweet below.
Brain Structure is a podcast that focuses on Kojima’s work and his inspiration. Available only on Spotify, it features both Japanese and English versions of each episode, and Geoff Keighly has a regular segment where he shares entertainment news. There have only been two episodes so far. While Kojima speaks Japanese, a translator dubs him with a slight delay so that we hear Kojima speaking. There’s also a robotic female voice, no doubt meant to sound like an AI assistant, who leads the conversation by asking questions and clarifying points.
In the first episode, Kojima basically introduced himself and the podcast. He created Brain Structure because he had fans around the world who wanted to hear about not only what he was working on but what inspires him as well. He liked radio programs but admitted that those would limit his audience to Japan, so he decided a podcast format would let him reach audiences around the world.
In the second episode, he switched from talking about his own work to talking about a film he truly enjoyed: Jordan Peele’s Nope. We already established that he loves movies, but it was an interesting episode of a sort of stream of thought on the movie. He didn’t want to spoil anything, so it was a little vague, but it was also obvious that he considered the work unique and interesting. He imagined that it must have been a difficult concept to sell in the beginning, and then spent a lot of time talking about UFOs. Apparently, if aliens are real, the world won’t have any use for games like Death Stranding.
The conversation between Kojima and Oshii is bound to be interesting and full of odd tangents. Two huge movie fans chatting about creative inspiration? One can only imagine where this will go. Tune in tomorrow on Spotify to find out!
