Denzel Washington and Spike Lee reunite for adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low

Denzel Washington and Spike Lee are back together again.

The Training Day star and the Do the Right Thing filmmaker are set to team up for their fifth collaboration: a reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 crime classic High and Low. The film from Apple and A24 will begin shooting next month, and will release theatrically before debuting on Apple TV+.

The duo first joined forces for 1990’s jazz dramedy Mo’ Better Blues, which saw Washington play a cocky trumpeter caught between two competing romances. Their best-known collaboration, the epic biopic Malcolm X, came in 1992, receiving some of the highest acclaim of Lee and Washington’s respective careers (though Washington ultimately lost the Oscar that year to Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman — a fact that Lee himself called out in his She’s Gotta Have It series). 

The pair’s third collaboration, 1999’s He Got Game, cast Washington as a father struggling to connect with his son (Ray Allen), an elite high school basketball player. Their most recent project together was 2006’s Inside Man, a gripping crime thriller in which Washington played an NYPD detective negotiating a hostage situation with a bank robber (Clive Owen). Though the pair hasn’t worked together in almost two decades, Lee did cast Washington’s son John David Washington as the lead in his acclaimed BlacKkKlansman in 2018, for which the filmmaker won his only competitive Oscar to date.

Like Inside Man, Kurosawa’s High and Low also involves a tense hostage negotiation. The film stars the director’s frequent collaborator Toshiro Minfune as a wealthy businessman whose chauffeur’s son is kidnapped by a mysterious antagonist. Roughly the first third of the movie takes place entirely in a single room of a high-rise building as Mifune’s character considers paying the ransom, while the remainder of the film sees investigators methodically scour the city to track down the kidnapper. The film was based on Ed McBain’s 1959 novel King's Ransom, and was the inspiration for Steven Soderbergh’s recent Max miniseries Full Circle.

Washington and Lee are no strangers to remakes of classic films — the actor starred in Antoine Fuqua’s reimagining of The Magnificent Seven (which itself is a loose remake of another Kurosawa film, Seven Samurai), while Lee remade Park Chan-wook’s gritty crime drama Oldboy. Though Lee’s Oldboy was poorly received, it seems that the filmmaker himself was unhappy with the final cut of the film, as the director reportedly was forced to cut an hour out of the runtime some noted that the film’s credits describe it as “a Spike Lee Film” rather than his signature “Spike Lee Joint.”

Since the Oldboy debacle, Lee has largely made movies outside of the traditional studio system, working with Amazon on Chi-Raq and Pass Over and with Netflix on Da 5 Bloods and She’s Gotta Have It. He also crowd-funded 2014’s Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, a remake of Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess.

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