The REAL Big Boss talks about the future of Metal Gear Solid

Hey, this is David Hayter.

I am the voice actor behind Solid Snake, Naked Snake, Big Boss from the Metal Gear series.

And I'm here to answer your questions.

Is Snake and Big Boss's voice based on someone, like an impression of a movie actor you grew up watching?

No, I knew that Snake would be compared to Escape from New York, which is one of my favorite things.

And so I didn't want it to sound like him.

I really wanted it to sound like me, but my voice, especially when I was younger, is sort of pitched up here.

And then I read the script of Metal Gear Solid and I realized that Snake was already retired and he was already a legend.

didn't want to come back.

I felt like he just needed to sound older and have come through more damage.

And so it was really just where the character was at that created the voice.

What is the most difficult scene that you had to portray in the whole Metal Gear franchise?

That's a good question.

Probably the most difficult scene would be the final brawl with Liquid.

ocelot on top of the submarine in Metal Gear 4 because throughout Metal Gear 4 Snake is aging rapidly and so I wanted him to start out here and then by the end to be completely desiccated that his throat is falling apart and so and then of course by that scene he's kind of at his most

decrepit and he's got to have this fight, lots of action sounds, and it's lots of screaming at Liquid and so vocally that was probably the toughest scene to pull off.

Does it bother Mr. Hater that he didn't voice Venom Snake with the hindsight knowing that Venom is not big boss or solid?

Yeah, well it bothers me that anybody else would play Snake and

I understand that canon-wise he's not technically Big Boss or Solid Snake.

However, I just played the game and I didn't realize that you have to listen to like 64 cassette tapes before you get that bit of information.

So I would argue that was a bit of a cheat that they just sort of slipped that in there to say why it wasn't me voicing the thing, when of course it was Akio Otsuka, the classic voice of Snake, who voiced him.

uh the japanese game so yes is it still annoying me sure but not that much i mean come on were any of the lines in metal gear solid david's idea and the answer is no

Now, the script is unchangeable.

You can't change a single word or sound.

You just do it as written, and that's Metal Gear.

So what do you envision the future of the Metal Gear franchise to develop into?

Would you be interested in a Metal Gear anime series?

Yeah, look, Konami owns the Metal Gear franchise, so it's really up to them.

I'm not sure what, if any, are the future plans for it.

But there's been behind-the-scenes talk about a Metal Gear animated series, and doing it anime-style would be amazing.

I would love to do that.

I'd love to bring back the original voice cast and all those people because I love them so much and I think it would be a really cool opportunity to make a badass show and not have to spend as much as you would on a big budget movie.

Which character in Metal Gear Solid would you have dinner with?

I would have dinner with almost any of them.

Psycho Mantis might be a little uncomfortable.

But I literally had dinner night before last with Christopher Randolph, who plays Otacon, so that immediately leaps to mind.

He's excellent dinner company.

What is your favorite snake quote?

I have a lot of favorite snake quotes, but I think my favorite is Metal Gear 4 when he says, I'm no hero.

Never was.

Never will be.

I'm just an old killer hired to do some wet work.

I just think that's cool badass.

Who is your favorite Metal Gear Solid character besides Snake or Big Boss?

That's impossible to say.

I mean, I love Otacon.

I love the Colonel.

But I love Vulcan Raven and Sniper Wolf and the Boss.

And I don't care much about Paz or Sonny.

But there's too many lovable characters.

I love Ocelot, for God's sakes, and my brother Liquid.

So, too many favorites to specify.

Why did Hideo make Raiden the main protagonist in Metal Gear Solid 2?

I don't know.

My theory is that Mr. Kojima sort of went down a road creating games that's centered around an American-style hero, because that would sell around the world.

And I think that Raiden, to me, felt like more of a Japanese-style character.

And secretly, I believe that Raiden represents Hideo Kojima's soul.

When a great director finds an actor that they feel represents them, like Scorsese did with De Niro, I kind of feel like that's the situation with Raiden.

But again, it's just conjecture.

So I think he just wanted a main character that felt a little more close to his hometown.

What is my favorite aspect of Solid Snake's character?

My favorite aspect of Snake's character is his heart.

It's very easy when you're playing an ultra badass to make him unfeeling and just so jaded that his emotions are deadened.

And if anything, Snake, while he wants to be that way, while he wants to shut things out, and throughout each game he just demonstrates how much he loves the people around him, how much he cares about the people of the world and saving them for the sake of saving them.

So it just adds a really beautiful aspect to Snake's character, I think.

Will there be another Metal Gear Solid game?

don't know you tell me i mean obviously it's a popular franchise you know typically a company will want to keep making games like that if they're still popular but i couldn't say no idea do you answer your phone the way snake does in metal gear solid 3. snake what's up boss don't you what's up me just what do you think you're doing

What do you mean?

No, no, because I'm a grown man and I'm actually a screenwriter and I get calls from studios and I get, you know, business calls all the time.

So it would be strange if I was like, hello.

However, I will say that when Christopher Randolph or Paul Eiding, Otacon or the Colonel call me, or Lori Allen, the boss, when I see it's their name, I will always answer, Otacon or Colonel.

And they'll always, always, always say, Snake!

and uh so that's pretty fun which game did david start noticing mgs was a big franchise well the first game while we were making it i i i got to see some of the game and i obviously got to see what they were doing with the script with cut scenes so i knew it would be a big selling game um but i did not know that it would be the juggernaut that it became so i guess

I guess it was after Metal Gear Solid came out and all of the gaming magazines were saying that this was a game changer and changed the whole world of gaming that I knew that we had made a big impact.

And then when they asked me to do Metal Gear 2, once they started doing sequels, you're pretty much on a hit franchise.

So it sort of gradually came to me, but I did know from the beginning that it was going to be popular.

It was not this popular.

How did you get the role of the bartender in both Yakuza Like a Dragon and Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth?

My friend Keith Aaron, who is a video game producer and director, just offered it to me.

He said, oh, by the way, I'm doing this game.

We got this character who, in the 80s, was this badass...

Yakuza now now he's an older guy he's got this bar and so on and so forth but he's kind of a legendary character in the in the lore of the game so it'd be kind of cool to have you play it and so um went to high school in Japan very close to uh I love Japanese culture I've met many Yakuza back in my day so I thought this was a really cool thing to take on however he was an older badass

And I didn't want him to sound like Snake or Old Snake.

I wanted to separate those performances.

I was trying to think of what I could do.

So that voice, I actually decided to do an impression, which I'd never done before.

So I did kind of a bad Harrison Ford impression.

And I thought that would be tough, but not overly gravely.

And so that's where that voice came in.

Bringing people together is what a bartender does.

How did you decide on the perfect stories to adapt for X-Men 1 and 2?

We chose the stories... Well, for X-Men 1, the studio and the director were very concerned that the audience wouldn't understand all the weird elements to what X-Men is.

There's all these super-powered people, they've got all these different powers, they've got different names, you know, all these things.

So a lot of the

first movie was basic setup.

And so, you know, the best way to introduce people to that world was how they used to do it in the X-Men comic books.

And my favorite example of that is in the comic books when Kitty Pryde first meets the X-Men

gets attacked out in this diner by these giant armored people and the X-Men save her life and then they take her back to the mansion and she goes through the mansion and as she's introduced to all the characters and introduced to the mansion, the audience gets introduced to all those things.

We thought that that would be the ideal framework for the first movie.

And we wanted to keep the story simple.

So Magneto had his machine.

He was going to turn all the world leaders in the world into mutants.

But of course, it was all going to go wrong.

And the X-Men had to stop him.

Once the first movie was a hit, I asked if we had to do all that setup over again.

And they said, no, we just assume everyone's seen the first movie and we just hit the ground running.

So as soon as they said that, I sat down and I wrote the opening script.

Nightcrawler attacks the White House sequence, which is one of my favorites.

And what I suggested, we used the book God Loves, Man Kills.

It was an X-Men graphic novel from the 80s that I loved.

And I just thought it was such a perfect distillation of everything the X-Men mean and everything they face in the world.

These very personal questions of, am I a mutant?

Am I a monster?

Am I part of humanity?

sort of went with it.

I don't know if anybody ever read God Loves Man Kills, but I did, and that was the basis for the second film.

Hey, this is David Hayter, and this has been Solid Snake Answers Your Questions on Experts React.