UB Spotlight: ‘Highest 2 Lowest’ | Spike Lee + Denzel Washington

After nearly twenty years, two-time Academy Award winner Denzel Washington reunites with the legendary Spike Lee for a new joint “Highest 2 Lowest.”

A new pulse pounding NYC thriller.

In select theaters August 22nd, and Apple TV+ September 5th.

When a titan music mogul (Denzel Washington), widely known as having the “best ears in the business”, is targeted with a ransom plot, he is jammed up in a life-or-death moral dilemma.

Brothers Denzel Washington and Spike Lee reunite for the 5th in their long working relationship for a reinterpretation of the great filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s crime thriller “High and Low,” now played out on the mean streets of modern day New York City.

What would you do to save your own child? What would you do to save the child of someone you love? Impossible questions confront music mogul David King in “Highest 2 Lowest,” the new crime thriller.

It is the prolific director’s 24th narrative feature, and his first in more than a decade set and shot in New York City. A thoroughly modern reinterpretation of “High and Low,” the masterful 1963 crime drama from Akira Kurosawa, “Highest 2 Lowest” stars Oscar-winner Denzel Washington as David King, a towering figure in the music industry whose label, Stackin’ Hits Records, has minted chart-topping artists for more than two decades.

Despite that success, he finds himself at a career crossroads as a proposed merger threatens to take his company in a new direction and undermine his legacy.

For Lee, the movie’s central moral quandary was territory he was eager to explore. It is also the through line connecting his new film to Kurosawa’s stately black-and-white drama, which starred the director’s longtime collaborator Toshiro Mifune as a respected executive who must choose between his own fortune or the life of his chauffer’s child. “In the original, he was an executive shoemaker, but I thought we had to change that, respectfully,” Spike states “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.”

Embarking on his first collaboration with Washington since 2006’s Inside Man, the director says he couldn’t believe so much time had elapsed. “I was shocked when someone told me that the last time we worked [together] was 19 years ago,” Spike Lee stated. “It did not seem like that to me or Denzel. We were both surprised it had been that long.” “There are some people that you don’t have to see every day to still have that relationship,” Lee continued. “It’s been many years: Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game and Inside Man. So, this is the fifth film of the dynamic duo. He’s one of the world’s greatest living actors, and I’m very happy we got to work together again.”

It’s fitting, then, that their fifth film together will premiere as part of the Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival today May 19th. 36 years to the day that Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” celebrated its world premiere in Cannes, and on what would have been the 100th birthday of Malcolm X today.

In bringing the story to life, director and his always-charismatic star fashioned a propulsive, edge-of-your seat thriller driven by Washington’s riveting starring turn as David King. Yet their dire consequences, Highest 2 Lowest touches on many other potent themes: artistic integrity and commercialism; the modern appetite for fame and celebrity at any price; and tremendous class disparity that drives people to extreme ends.

However, Lee also uses the high-wire narrative for uplift, showcasing the transcendent power of music and the loving bonds of a close-knit African American family. It makes for a film that is provocative, timely and entertaining—as well as a dizzying love letter to the energy, majesty and unparalleled diversity of New York City in all its grit and glamour. “You know what that is?” says Lee. “That’s A Spike Lee Joint.”

For Washington, exploring the psyche of someone who, driven both by ego and by what he believes to be his life’s purpose, risks his family’s financial security only to find himself on the verge of losing everything was too tempting to resist. “I’m a man of God,” the actor says. “I liked the [idea of going on this] journey of a man who, I’m gonna say, is faithless, who may have considered himself a god in his industry. When we meet him, he’s already been humbled. He is looking for a hit. The car is 10 years old—it is a Rolls Royce, but it’s 10 years old. He’s holding on to what he was, and he’s willing to leverage his home and everything else for a dream that may no longer be his. The music has changed. Everyone can see it but him. I thought that was an interesting idea that I wanted to engage with, especially when and where I am in my own life right now.”

With Washington in the lead role, Lee and his filmmaking partners, including producers Jason Michael Berman and Todd Black, set out to build a stellar ensemble cast around the actor, searching for talents who could match the star in every scene. Chief among them was Academy Award nominee Jeffrey Wright , who was cast as David’s childhood friend Paul.

A man with a checkered past, Paul makes a living as David’s driver, but the pair are essentially family, even though their economic circumstances couldn’t be farther apart. “This fraternal relationship between these two men is bound up in some of these class tensions,” Wright stated. “I was really pleased that we were able to find that and then build a kind of backstory for the two of them. They’ve run the streets together. One ascended and one did not, but they have an allegiance to one another.”

On set, both he and Wright relished the opportunity to dig into the dynamic between these two fathers at a moment when they are being tested in unimaginable ways. “Day to day, doing scenes together, Denzel and I were able to find things that weren’t necessarily on the page that were beneficial to the story and added to the richness of that relationship,” Wright said.

If Paul is David King’s oldest friend, his wife Pam is his closest confidante. To play Pam, Lee cast Ilfenesh Hadera, who previously had worked with the filmmaker on projects including his 2013 remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, 2015’s “Chi-raq” and the television series adaptation of “She’s Gotta Have It.”

Hadera brought an overt sophistication and grace to Pam, a woman of poise and conviction who is a source of love and support for her husband and son—and every inch David’s equal. “Pam has definite feelings about how the whole family operates,” Spike Lee said. For her part, Hadera wanted to tap into both the character’s resilience and her innate warmth. “David King is a larger-than life figure and maybe not always approachable, even as a father, because of the man that he is, so it was important to me to make Pam not just a mother but a friend to Trey,” Hadera says. “I grew up in a family where my mother was my absolute best friend, and that’s how I wanted Pam to treat Trey.”

As Trey, actor Aubrey Joseph sought to portray just how much the character respects his father even as he’s frustrated by King’s reluctance to consider his son’s perspective on both the future of the company and on how to respond to the kidnapping. “He’s young, he’s hungry and he wants his father to see him not just as a son, but as somebody that could really take the reins of Stackin’ Hits,” says Joseph. “He’s trying to become a man and come into his own as a man.”

Although the first act largely unfolds inside the confines of the King home, “Highest 2 Lowest” then opens out into the city, showcasing New York as only Spike Lee can. “Spike keeps it real,” Hadera states. “He’s up in the Bronx. He’s in Brooklyn. You talk about warts and all, like all the beauty of real, historic Brooklyn, the way it used to be, and gentrified Brooklyn now. He’s not trying to glamorize or show New York in a light that it isn’t, and that’s, I think, how any real New Yorker rolls.”

Throughout, every scene bristles with a palpable, you-are-there urgency. Spike Lee and his cinematographer, Matthew Libatique— the three-time Academy Award nominee who first worked with the director on 2004’s “She Hate Me” — modeled the kinetic sequence in part on one of the classics of 20th century crime cinema. “I’m a cinephile,” Lee said. “It’s a shout out to the late great Gene Hackman and Billy Friedkin from The French Connection, that great subway scene.”

As always, he took a hands-on approach to all the music and musical references that shape the story. “I grew up in a music household,” stated Spike Lee, whose jazz musician father Bill Lee performed with icons including Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin. “Over the years, I really take pride in how I use music to help my storytelling, not just go to Billboard and pick a hit record. I don’t do that.”

For the film’s score, which was recorded in New York with a full 90-piece orchestra, Spike Lee reunited with composer Howard Drossin, who previously had written the orchestrations for many of the director’s projects including BlacKkKlansman, Chi-Raq and Inside Man. “For Highest 2 Lowest, Spike wanted a sweeping orchestral score, occasionally interwoven with the intimacy of a jazz trio,” Drossin explained. “After I read the script, I wrote a bunch of themes on piano and sent them to Spike. Our process is very collaborative. During spotting sessions, we discuss instrumentation and tone for each scene. Spike has a great way of speaking about music that makes it easy to translate into score.”

Instagram yielded one important discovery for the film’s soundtrack. While perusing the social media site, Spike Lee came across 24-year-old soul singer Aiyana-Lee, and when he heard her dazzling vocals, the filmmaker knew he wanted to feature her on screen. “Aiyana-Lee, no relation, but she’s still my sister,” Spike says.

A$AP Rocky also contributed to the “Highest 2 Lowest” film and soundtrack, writing original tracks that he performs in character and which becomes integral to the plot of the film. “Yung Felon’s music, I didn’t want to be too much like A$AP Rocky,” stated A$AP. “I wanted it to have its own identity. Yung Felon is more so an eclectic New York Bronx native with an urban hood tendency. So, we sprinkled a bit of that on it with some flayers of some exquisite sounds and came up with something a little different.”

The incredible sonic tapestry reflects the wildly varied soundscape of New York—sophisticated and stripped down, tapping into frequencies both “High and Low.” Spike lee says, “Music plays a character in this film.”