Spike Lee and Denzel Washington are reportedly working on an adaptation of Kurosawa’s High and Low for Apple TV.
The film is produced by A24, will start filming next month, and will also have a theatrical release. The script was written by Lee and Alan Fox, whose IMDb credits say very little to me. Lee has previously talked about Rashomon having been an inspiration on his debut film She’s Gotta Have It.
This follows Steven Soderbergh’s HBO series Full Circle, which came out last year and also drew inspiration from High and Low. This reminds me that I never watched its last episode, and as my plan was to write about it after I had seen it to the end, I also never wrote about it. The series starts as an interesting play on Kurosawa’s film, but I felt its ambitions were higher than it was able to pull off narratively. But then again, I never finished the series. My circle was never full.
Did you guys watch Full Circle and are you looking forward to Spike Lee’s take on High and Low?
I’m looking forward to the Lee remake just as long as it brings more attention to the original. He’s talked up his love for Kurosawa many times in the past, so hopefully he’ll continue to do so when he’s promoting this…
I could see him (and especially Denzel) having an original take on the material. Hopefully he doesn’t try to stay stylistically close to the original though, because aping another director definitely didn’t work for him with Oldboy.
It’s not one where a new adaptation can go back to the “roots” of the original novel either, because King’s Ransom is prosaically written garbage for the most part. The book is very much an endorsement of King’s (Gondo’s) original shark-like libertarian capitalism, whereas Kurosawa smartly inverts all of that (while also jettisoning McBain’s rampant misogyny).
I’d like the remake to be good, but not holding my breath.