Why Denzel Washington Movie Took 35 Years To Make

Producer Jason Michael Berman was in grade school, while screenwriter Alan Fox was a toddler when Hollywood first tried to get a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic High and Low off the ground. Thirty five years later, they are two of the people responsible for it finally hitting theaters as Highest 2 Lowest, the first collaboration between director Spike Lee and star Denzel Washington in 18 years.

The year was 1990.

Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet was hired to write a remake of High and Low, which was based on the Ed McBain novel King’s Ransom and followed a Japanese shoe executive whose driver’s son is mistakenly targeted by kidnappers.

Mamet turned in a few drafts, but it never got off the ground. From there, a procession of writers and directors followed. Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols and I’m Still Here Oscar winner Walter Salles were attached to direct at various points, while scribes involved including Jeff King and Ransom screenwriter Richard Price. Mamet even returned to try a new draft in 2009, while a year after that, Chris Rock took a stab at his own script. Along the way, power producer Scott Rudin boarded to shepherd it along.

In all, Disney spent around $10 million on development costs via its Touchstone and Miramax labels, where the project was set up at various points. (It was, after all, the era in which screenwriters were paid millions for their services.)

Then, the project languished.

Cut to 2019. Producer Berman got a call from Washington’s longtime WME agent, Andrew Finkelstein. Finkelstein said his Oscar-winning client had long been interested in High and Low, but it needed a fresh take, a reason for it to exist today. Not only that, the rights would soon be up for grabs after lapsing at Disney.

“He told me, ‘This is a lottery ticket. You’re either throwing $150,000 for rights into the fire, or you’re going to find a great writer, and you’re going to get the rights and go make it,’” recalls Berman, known for Ben Affleck’s Air and now the president of his A/Vantage Pictures.

Berman decided to take a chance on the so-called lottery ticket, joining forces with Rudin, and finding a partner to put up the $150,000 for the rights. He then spent three years negotiating with the Kurosawa estate before ultimately securing a rights extension. (Rudin ultimately departed the project after his Hollywood career imploded in 2021 following allegations of abusive behavior.)

With the rights in hand, Berman still needed to solve the problem that no one had cracked: find a script that someone would actually make.

“It was a high bar,” says Berman. “To get a movie that has that much money against it made, you need to deliver a script to a movie star who can justify the budget.”

That’s because whoever made it would need to negotiate with Disney to cover the $10 million-plus in chain of title costs related to rights and screenplay costs from its decades in development.

While heavyweight writers had penned previous drafts, Berman decided to bring the concept to acquaintance Alan Fox, an unknown screenwriter who’d written several unproduced scripts for players such as Spider-Man producer Amy Pascal.

On the surface, Fox didn’t look like the natural choice. Even the screenwriter even had doubts.

“It was a murderer’s row of people that had done previous drafts of it,” recalls Fox, who got to know Berman on a previous project that didn’t go. “It was a kind of, ‘Really man? You sure this is what you want to do?’”

The opportunity came at just the right time for Fox. In the three months before Berman approached him, he’d had three movies with stars and directors attached all disappear. And his girlfriend of a few years broke up with him, too.

Fox pitched setting the movie in the world of New York music, drawing from his experience of knowing the driver for a prominent record label executive. Meanwhile, Washington’s agent Finkelstein suggested bringing in veteran producer Todd Black, known for the star’s The Equalizer movies. Berman was excited, because he had known Black from interning for him 20 years earlier while in his freshman year at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Together, Berman and Black took Fox’s pitch to A24, who agreed to hire Fox as the writer to expand his pitch into a script.

The pressure was high, as Washington was still not on board, and would only have a small window to read the script in between work on projects such as Gladiator II and The Equalizer 3. The entire movie depended on him saying yes.

“They were like, ‘The big guy is coming off of Equalizer come January. If he doesn’t have something to read, then you miss your window,’” recalls Fox.

Fox relocated from New York to the deserts of Arizona to write for a few months, studying Washington’s films to cater it to him. He studied the original Kurosawa movie and read the filmmaker’s autobiography. He realized that if Kurosawa’s movie was about early capitalism in Japan, the new version could be about late-stage capitalism in America. He made it a generational story, with Washington playing a fading music mogul who goes toe-to-toe with a younger man, later cast as A$AP Rocky. He infused it with themes of social media today’s attention economy.

Fox delivered the script to Berman and fellow producer Black in January 2023. There wasn’t much to polish, but longtime Washington collaborator Black had concerns about the ending. “Originally, my ending, in his words, was ‘not the kind of ending that Denzel’s target audience in Long Beach would want to see,’” recalls Fox with a laugh. Fox admits to feeling defensive, but ultimately tweaked the ending before the team sent it to Washington.

After years on the project, Berman didn’t have to wait long for an answer.

Washington sent the script to Spike Lee before he had even told Berman and Black he was in. The filmmaker was soon on board.

 “Spike flew out to meet with Todd and I, and said, ‘let’s do it,” recalls Berman.

The film is now in theaters, and will arrive on Apple TV+ on Sept. 5. It marks the fifth collaboration between Washington and Lee. It bowed at the Cannes Film Festival to strong reviews, and stands at a 91 percent critics ratings on Rotten tomatoes.

As for Berman and Fox, they have other projects in development, and also collaborate on the podcast Notes with Jack, which has a round-about connection to Highest 2 Lowest. The podcast centers around Fox’s conversations with 86-year-old Tony winning director Jack O’Brien, for an inter-generational conversation about creativity. (When you see Highest 2 Lowest, you may notice a scene or two that mirrors their chats, though in a much less friendly way.)

“There was a lot of risk and a lot of money involved that could have just disappeared,” says Berman of boarding the project six years ago. But partners such as A24 took a chance on Fox, “a young talent who had never had a screenplay produced before, and gave that talent a chance.”