Spike Lee made headlines at Cannes this year when premiering his new film Highest 2 Lowest and announcing that it would likely be his last team-up with frequent collaborator Denzel Washington.
“I think this is it — five,” Lee told reporters of his and Washington’s number of films together. “He’s been talking about retirement, even though he’s just done another deal. Five films together, they stand up.”
The pair have united for Inside Man, Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game and now Highest 2 Lowest, but at the new film’s New York premiere on Monday, Lee walked back those previous comments and kept the door open for more projects with Washington.
“I said that before, but I got my mind right,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m open to work with Denzel Washington and this not be the last film of the dynamic duo, D and Lee.”
Highest 2 Lowest is a reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low and sees a powerful music mogul (Washington) targeted by a ransom plot and put in a life-or-death moral dilemma. A$AP Rocky, Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera, Elijah Wright, Wendell Pierce and Ice Spice also appear in the film.
“I became a student of Akira Kurosawa at NYU’s graduate film school — that’s where I saw Rashomon, that’s where I saw many of Samurai films, that’s where I saw High and Low,” Lee recalled, noting that Washington “had gotten the property and he sent it to me; he said, ‘Spike read the script. If you like, let’s go.’ I read it right away, called him up, I think the next day and said, ‘Let’s go.’ It happened like that.”
The famed filmmaker also weighed in on the film’s tagline “All Money Ain’t Good Money,” saying, “We know what that is and we know that sometimes in life we have to make that choice. And hopefully we make the right choice.”
Highest 2 Lowest hits theaters on Friday and starts streaming on Apple TV+ on Sept. 5.
Neha Joy contributed to this report.
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