Norman Reedus Has High Praise For Hideo Kojima And Death Stranding

Norman Reedus has been quite busy as of late. Along with working on the latest season of AMC’s The Walking Dead and his motorcycle enthusiast series Ride with Norman Reedus, he’s also been hard at work on Death Stranding, the surreal, original adventure from Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima

CNET recently caught up with Reedus in an extensive interview, where he talks about his experience working on his TV series. One noteworthy part of it, however, lets him discuss the genius of Hideo Kojima.

Even though some people that worked on the project didn’t have an idea of what was happening with the story (star Mads Mikkelsen has discussed so much in the past, though he highly enjoyed working on it), that didn’t stop Reedus from giving him praise for trying something incredibly new.

“It’s mind blowing,” he noted. “He’s a genius. He came out to San Diego for Comic-Con, and he had some stuff on an iPad that he wanted to show me. I sat in a little restaurant at a booth watching this iPad and the things he’d created, and I was just blown away. I was like, ‘Whatever you want to do, let’s do it. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’ It’s unreal. People will do whatever he wants because he’s a visionary.”

That said, it’ll still be some time before we see the finished work for the game, as it’s still in production. Just the other day, we posted an update on its progress, with Mikkelsen noting that the performance capture for the game is still very much in the works.

But he too admired Kojima’s approach to the strange, yet satisfying material. Noted Mikkelsen, “It’s enormously different. The scenes are very small, it’s a very physical approach, you have a lot of cameras on, and you’re in a green screen room. We have to go through all kinds of facial expressions and movements, so later on [Hideo Kojima] can morph it into whatever he wants.”

He also added, “Hideo Kojima is a fantastically inspiring man, and his brain is working on a different level, so I can’t wait to see what he’s doing with it.”

Yeah, we just want to play the game already!

Death Stranding doesn’t have a release date, but will release exclusively for PlayStation 4.