Spike Lee, Denzel Washington Reuniting To Remake Japanese Film

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Denzel Washington and Spike Lee are teaming up for the fifth time for a remake of a Japanese movie.

The Oscar-winning duo is doing an English-language version of the 1963 Akira Kurosawa movie, High & Low. It’s about a business executive who has to calculate his moral compass when kidnappers mistakenly take his employee’s son instead of his and hold him for ransom. The movie is already in pre-production, scheduled to start shooting in March with a script by Lee and playwright Alan Fox.

Fox received acclaim for his play, Safe Space, in 2019 and is the writer of Queen of the Stoned Age, which actress Dakota Johnson is attached to at Sony Pictures.

The new film was financed by A24 and Apple TV+. It will be released in theaters by A24 and then be available on the Apple TV+ platform.

The other projects the two have done together have been successful. Their last, 2006’s Inside Man, along with 1992’s Malcolm X, 1990’s Mo’ Betta Blues and 1998’s He Got Game were all commercially and critically acclaimed.

While they are the only site with this info so far, the indie site World of Reel is reporting that Halle Berry has been offered the role of the wife in High & Low. But if filming is starting in March, seems like that would have been confirmed by now.

Lee has said in the past that he and Washington work so well together because over time they’ve gotten to know each other’s process.

“I think it’s evident by the work we’ve done,” Lee told NPR’s Scott Simon in 2006, when Inside Man was released. “And we have acquired sort of like a shorthand. You know, we do most of our discussion, rehearsals, but we’re on the set, we know what we have to do. So there’s not a lot of need for a whole lot of talking.”