Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, Ice Spice and A$AP Rocky Combine For Crime Movie Set In Music Business
Source: Tim P. Whitby / Getty
With everything going on with the allegations of sexual assault in the music business and the high-powered but twisted men it exposed, this is prime time for a movie set in that world. And Spike Lee’s going to make it, with long-time collaborator Denzel Washington. If that’s not enough for any film lover to get excited about, it’s a remake of legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1963 film High and Low.
Well, according to Lee, not quite.
“This is not a remake, this is a reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s great film,” Lee told Deadline while at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia last week where he led the jury. His version will be called Highest 2 Lowest, which he said was influenced by his “Gemini brother, Prince.”
In the 1963 film, based on crime writer Ed McBain’s book The Kings’s Ransom, a shoe company executive has to decide whether or not to save someone else’s son with the money he’s earmarked to take over the company. In Lee’s version, Washington will play a record executive.
“In Kurosawa’s film, [actor] Toshiro Mifune is a shoemaker,” said Lee. “In our film, Denzel Washington is a music mogul with his own label and his reputation as the best ears in the business. So, this is the fifth film with the dynamic duo.”
The duo is of course, Washington and Lee, who’ve so far collaborated on, The Inside Man, Malcolm X, Mo’ Better Blues and He Got Game, all of which hit the cultural zeitgeist in i,mpactful ways. Lee provided no details on how he may change the plot of the film, which has been remade before, or what roles previously announced cast members Ice Spice and A$AP Rocky will play. He said that Rocky would have a “main role” in the Highest 2 Lowest.
Lee says he’s in post-production on the A24/Apple Originals film, which is expected to be released in the summer. It will first air in theatres and then on Apple TV+.
When asked by a Deadline reporter what dialogue Denzel might have in the film, Spike said, “Is Al Green? Is Barry White? Is James Brown? Is Prince purple? Does that answer your question?”
Watch Lee’s full interview below:
