"I had to re-audition for Metal Gear 3 to play Naked Snake...I heard that Kojima asked one of the producers on Metal Gear 3 to ask Kurt Russell if he would take over for that game. He didn't want to do it."

"You got to understand that from my point of view, whether it's Elvis, or Snake Plissken, or Jack Burton, or R.J. MacReady, that was that project, that was that thing, you get into that mindset, you create that, you wanna make that world happen. [...] You don't just slide in and out of Elvis, you go to work on it, you refine it, and then you do it, and you get paid for that. I come from a different era. I wasn't interested in expanding financially off of something that we had created or that I had created in terms of a character. And I get business people, sure: "Oh, we could do this with that, we could do this with that, or we could do this with that." You know, and I look at it and I go "That's not written by John [Carpenter]. That doesn't smell right, John's not here to do this with, [...] I'm not gonna do that." Let's go do something new. Let's go do something fresh. Let's go create another iconic character rather than saying "What can we bleed off of this iconic character?" you know? You don't look at them as iconic characters, I mean like, you refer to them as that if they become that, [...] you're on a day-to-day, running it, having a good time and trying to make it work."