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Q&A with Spike Lee

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Highest to Lowest.

Your relationship with Akira Kurosawa dates back to the beginning of your career. Can you share how you first encountered Kurosawa’s work and what drew you to reimagine it?

Spike Lee: People always assume that this film is a remake of Kurosawa’s High and Low, but it actually began with Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom. I once met Kurosawa in Tokyo; he signed a piece of calligraphy for me with a paintbrush, and that moment stayed with me as a reminder of the master’s generosity. Years later the script found its way to Denzel Washington. He called me from an unfamiliar number, told me he had something I needed to read, and sent it overnight. Before I’d even hung up the phone I knew I was going to direct—it had been nineteen years since we collaborated on Inside Man, and the idea of reuniting excited both of us. When we sat down for the first read‑through it was as if no time had passed; that shorthand allowed us to take a classic story and bend it to our own rhythm. I kept thinking about how John Coltrane could take a song like ‘My Favorite Things’ and make it his own without losing respect for the original. That was our goal. We weren’t interested in a shot‑for‑shot remake. We approached this adaptation like jazz musicians: you know the melody, but you riff, you improvise, and you make it yours. And because Denzel and I have that Batman‑and‑Robin partnership, we trust each other to try things you wouldn’t attempt with anyone else.

imagine doing that while holding a bag of ransom money

One of the most electric moments in the film is the confrontation between David King and a young hustler, which feels almost like a rap battle. How did that come together on set?

S.L.: That scene was scripted as an argument, but on the day Denzel surprised all of us by quoting verses from Nas’s Nastradamus. A$AP Rocky rolled with it, trading bars and energy like two MCs. I didn’t know Denzel was going to bring those lines; neither did Rocky. You watch two artists…a legend and a rising star…pushing each other in real time. It becomes a high‑noon showdown: the camera holds steady as they fire off words, and you feel the tension mount without a single cut. Rocky isn’t a seasoned screen actor, but he stood tall opposite Denzel, and that courage shows on screen. The scene lifts the whole movie because it’s alive. This is our fifth film together, and Denzel understands that sometimes you have to break the script open to find the truth. Rocky matched him beat for beat, and that improvisation gives the confrontation real juice. Afterward people asked if it was choreographed; it wasn’t. It was two performers trusting the moment and respecting each other’s craft.

The sequences set during the Puerto Rican Day Parade and the ransom drop are some of the most gripping in the film. Can you talk about blending music, sports and New York culture to build that tension?

S.L.: Eddie Palmieri and his band performed live in those scenes—there was no playback, no safety net. They were supposed to do one or two takes, but Eddie was having so much fun that we let him play eight or nine times, and he kept adding flourishes. He passed away just before our premiere, so those performances are especially precious now. I wanted the audience to understand that the kidnapper isn’t some caricature: he’s smart, demanding Swiss francs instead of dollars because he knows they’ll be easier to handle in a ransom drop. To raise the stakes, I set the drop on a weekend when the Yankees were playing the Red Sox and the Puerto Rican Day Parade was sweeping up the Bronx. If you’ve ever taken the 4 train to Yankee Stadium on a game day you know that feeling of being pressed shoulder‑to‑shoulder as fans pour in—now imagine doing that while holding a bag of ransom money. We scouted the roller‑skating park near Yankee Stadium and blocked out how to weave the parade, the band, and the ransom hand‑off together. I went up to the Blue Note to convince Eddie to join us and promised to keep his cameo a surprise so the moment would feel organic. All of these details—the live salsa, the parade floats, the rivalry—situate the thriller within the rhythms of New York. People tell me it’s a ‘great New York movie,’ and I take that as a compliment because the city itself is a character with its own music and pulse.

The film ends on an amazing musical sequence featuring a new performer singing a haunting song. When did you conceive of that final scene and how did you find the singer?

S.L.: New York used to be a magnet for artists from all over the world, but it’s become so expensive that a lot of creatives can only be discovered online. When I read the script and saw that the closing music hadn’t been specified, I knew it was my job to find a voice that could carry us home. I spent about an hour a day scrolling through Instagram looking for musicians and poets; that’s how I found Aiyana-Lee Anderson, a singer whose tone reminded me of Lauryn Hill, and a guitarist [Jensen McRae] who some people call ‘the Black Joni Mitchell.’ I flew to Los Angeles, met them both and asked them to write songs for the film. We recorded their performances live on set with the crew working quietly around them. In the editing room we noticed that when Alana sings, the camera lingers on Denzel’s face and you can see how deeply the song moves him. Denzel has an incredible ear—he grew up listening to Quincy Jones and knows how music can shape a scene—so he suggested we add subtle orchestration under her voice. That choice lets the audience hear the song the way David King hears it: first as an unadorned voice, then with arrangements that swell as his emotions swell. Technology brought us these artists, but the live recording grounds it in reality. To me that scene encapsulates what filmmaking can do: bring together story, music and performance so you leave the theatre feeling like you’ve been somewhere.

Q&A With Spike Lee

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The characters in the film are so complex and nuanced. Delroy Lindo’s character really defied convention.  Can you talk about working with your cast?

You have to have great actors. You have to cast great people to get great performances. I know it sounds basic and simple, but it is basic and simple. Not only Delroy. Isiah Whitlock, Clarke Peters, Norman Lewis, Jonathan Majors. They were doing work. And not under the best conditions either. We shot this in the jungles of Thailand. There wasn’t a day that was under 100 degrees. We were shooting in the jungle, and it was no joke. Jungles have snakes. We had to have a snake wrangler on set.  Snakes in a jungle don’t play. Snakes in a jungle have venom. We had a two-week boot camp in addition to the rehearsal process.

This is fourth time I’ve worked with Delroy Lindo, but it’s been a minute. When I sent him the script, he had trepidations. He couldn’t get around wearing that [MAGA] hat. He said “Spike, I’ll call you back you in a couple days.” Then he asked if we could make the character neo-conservative, and I said we can’t do that. He had to wear the hat. He said, “I’ll have to call you back in a couple days.” And he called me back and he got to a place where he could play that guy with that hat. What he did in that role… he did the damn thing.

This war never goes away.

What was it like collaborating with your Cinematographer Thomas Sigel? You play with formats and aspect ratios and film stock.

Tom and I are about the same age. The Vietnam War was televised in American living rooms. I was ten years-old; Tom was eleven. What we saw on the news was 16mm footage. So we shot with Super 16mm cameras for that footage. Norm Lewis’s character [Eddie] has a Super-8 camera, so the Super-8 stuff you saw was Norm’s stuff. In fact, he gets a credit in the film as a camera operator! Aspect ratios… we were feeling it. There was a lot of stuff we tried in the edit room that didn’t work. I have to shout-out to my editor, Adam Gough. We were exploring. We did not want to put creative handcuffs on ourselves.

I’d love to talk about the soundtrack and particularly the importance of that Marvin Gaye album throughout the film. I understand you got together with the cast to read the lyrics from that entire album?

I think Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On album is one of the great albums of all time. Marvin Gaye had an older brother named Franklin who did three tours in Vietnam. He was a raid operator so he was writing to Marvin a lot. Writing his firsthand experiences seeing that war is hell. Marvin’s reading that and he’s also seeing the black soldiers come back home to Detroit. That album came out in 1971, right in the middle of the Vietnam War. This is the album people were listening to. I was in high school. It’s always been a very memorable album. I’m old; it came out on vinyl! You had to flip it over. The way Marvin did it with the songs, they segue seamlessly from one to the other.

The actors knew that Marvin Gaye was a character in this movie. He’s the voice, the heart, the soul, the humanity.

Can you talk about the scene where Paul leaves the group and gives that incredible monologue directly to the camera?

That was scripted. It was one of those moments where Delroy was in the zone. The first take he had this big machete and it’s a close-up.  Not Steadicam, but handheld. As we’re doing the take, he’s chopping down all these trees. I said to the art department, “Find some more trees.” Every take we had to find more trees. I was hurting because he was on fire, and when actors are going, they want to go right away. But that scene, oh my god. He tore that up. People write to me and say “Spike, I had a father like Paul. My uncle, my father, my cousin… they were in Vietnam.” And the person that went to Vietnam was not the same person that came back. One of the best lines in the film is that this war never goes away. Families are still torn because of this amoral war.