Spike Lee and Denzel Washington's Kurosawa Remake Will Be an Ice Spice Joint As Well
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Denzel Washington and Spike Lee have made a fictitious period jazz movie, a white-knuckle bank-robbery thriller, an Oscar-nominated civil rights biopic, and one of the best basketball movies ever, so it’s hardly surprising that their sprawling shared CV will now include a new adaptation of an Akira Kurosawa classic. Yesterday it was announced that Washington and Lee have officially begun production on their fifth collaboration, a new take on 1963’s High and Low, backed by A24 and Apple per The Hollywood Reporter.
Though both have had storied careers and plenty of A-list collaborators, the creative relationship between Lee and Washington is often the one that first comes to fans’ minds for each of them. Beginning with 1990’s Mo’ Better Blues, the pair worked together on 1992’s Malcolm X, 1998’s He Got Game and 2006’s Inside Man, jumping across genres largely to critical and commercial success. Washington was also in talks to star in 2020’s Da 5 Bloods, per Collider, though that didn’t come to fruition. Some movie buffs may be skeptical of Lee’s involvement given the generally tepid reaction to his English-language remake of another Asian cinema classic, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, but High and Low does feel more squarely in Spike’s wheelhouse. (Lee is writing the script with relatively unknown collaborator Alan Fox.)
Despite the prominence of the Washington-Lee relationship, much social media chatter around the upcoming movie hinged on the news that it would mark the acting debut of New York rap star Ice Spice, as first reported by Variety. The 24-year-old Bronx MC has become a cultural mainstay these last three years, and is following in both the lineage of women in hip-hop acting (Queen Latifah, Eve, Cardi B), and her contemporaries more generally (Jack Harlow, Megan Thee Stallion, Quavo).
“Spike Lee is one of the best filmmakers in the world—as original and inventive as Kurosawa—and why not Ice Spice? Performing is performing, and there's a long tradition of musicians excelling as movie actors; so enough with the snoot-cocking,” prominent New Yorker film critic Richard Brody wrote on Twitter in response to some skepticism about the casting choice.
Lee has worked with a number of musicians over the years, from actor-rapper Nick Cannon in Chiraq to Q-Tip in She Hate Me to Jon Batiste in Red Hook Summer to jazz drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts in Mo’ Better Blues. (It didn’t come to fruition, but there were rumors at one point that Chiraq would star Chicago MCs Kanye West and Common.) He also famously drew a strong performance out of NBA star Ray Allen in He Got Game, which remains one of the gold standards of athlete-to-actor roles. Other announced members of the cast are recent Academy Award nominee Jeffrey Wright, and Ilfenesh Hadera, who has become a Lee favorite in the last decade.
It will be particularly intriguing to see how Spike’s well-publicized admiration for Kurosawa factors into his take on the source material. In a 2018 Forbes interview, Lee called Kurosawa “one of my heroes,” and citing his work as both an influence for She’s Gotta Have It specifically and his diverse, decades-long career more generally. “Kurosawa was 86! I got to at least get to Kurosawa,” he said, per The New Yorker.
High and Low, which drew inspiration from an Ed McBain crime novel called King’s Ransom, concerns a cutthroat businessman who finds himself at the center of a kidnapping and extortion scheme, with the investigating officers also playing major roles. (Two of the best movies of Spike Lee’s career, the ticking clock heist drama Inside Man and the 1970s period piece BlacKkKlansman, fall into the world of crime and law enforcement, so he’s battle-tested in the genre.) In July 2023, Max released Full Circle, a Steven Soderbergh miniseries starring Zazie Beetz, Claire Danes, and Jharrel Jerome, that was inspired by High and Low. It also served as the basis for the 1977 Indian thriller Inkaar and a 2007 Japanese television show.
In recent years, Lee has been attached to a few different projects, though the High and Low spin has evidently taken precedence. Last year, he was connected to a Broadway drama called Da Understudy with Jonathan Majors, and he told W that he was working on a musical about the creation of Viagra called Boner. Washington recently finished shooting on Ridley Scott’s hotly anticipated Gladiator sequel, and is rumored to be reuniting with director Antoine Fuqua for a new project. However High and Low turns out, its combination of a storied director-lead actor tandem, the acting debut of a major rap star, and beloved international source material from an all-time auteur means it’s one of the most intriguing films announced in recent memory.
Originally Appeared on GQ
