Highest 2 Lowest

High to Low is a cinematic masterpiece, a cornerstone of black and white crime thrillers by legendary director Akira Kurosawa. Can it be successfully adapted 62 years later? We’re about to find out as Denzel Washington and Spike Lee are reuniting for their 5th film Highest 2 Lowest.

The film centers around Denzel’s character David King, a music mogul who’s recently borrowed an incredible amount of money to buy back his company. At the moment he comes into the money he gets a ransom call for his son. But there’s a moral dilemma when there’s a twist on who’s actually been taken hostage, and what choice he should make, and what he’s able to do in that situation.
“In the original, he was an executive shoemaker, but I thought we had to change that, respectfully,” Lee says. “But the same way that audiences for decades have felt Tishiro Mifune’s anguish, they’re going to feel the same thing with Denzel Washington.”

This means instead of a fading CEO of a shoe business Washington is playing an owner of a record label that’s slowly slipping out of his grasp. This gave Spike Lee a perfect excuse to tie in a variety of artists and live performances as well as a 90 piece orchestra for the rest of the films score. For this he tapped composer Howard Drossin who he’s worked with in the past for BlacKkKlansman, Chi-Raq and Inside Man.

Spike Lee has been a student of Kurosawa’s work since he was a uni kid. The film Rashomon inspired Lee to do his own take on examining a single event from multiple perspectives in his 1986 feature debut She’s Gotta Have It.

“I used that premise for She’s Gotta Have It,” Lee says. “Nola Darling has three boyfriends at the same time, and you hear from these three different men giving their viewpoints of Nola. That came from me seeing Rashomon in NYU graduate film school.” To this day, he adds, one of his prized possessions remains a portrait Kurosawa gifted to him, signed in white paint.

The script for Highest 2 Lowest written by up-and-coming writer Alan Fox (Safe Space) was sent to Lee by Washington, who knew that the New York setting could only be captured properly by Spike Lee. “He is New York City,” says Washington. “He sees it in a way that I don’t even necessarily see it, and I was born and raised here. He’s one of a handful of visionary filmmakers that are unafraid, bold, brilliant. That was the easiest decision I made with this whole project, asking him to get involved.”

Says Lee: “I’ve been very fortunate in my film career. More often than not, the blessings that I receive are unannounced. I get a phone call or text or email and it starts. I love Kurosawa. I love High and Low. This was an opportunity to work with Denzel Washington and to shoot here in New York.”

I think it goes without saying that if you’re a film aficionado you should go watch the original if you haven’t yet.