Japanese legendary director Akira Kurosawa’s excellent crime movie HIGH AND LOW is being remade over at Miramax.
The astonishing original movie, one of my favourite Kurosawa films is about a ransom demand from kidnappers who mistakenly captured the wrong son (they got the driver’s instead!) leaving their original target, a businessman, with the moral dilemma of how much you would value a stranger’s life. Is it worth greater than your whole life’s work?
It’s a great, great movie, which recently got the Criterion Collection treatment and Mike Kaminski gave it and astonishing 5 star review here.
Which is why I’m surprised it has taken Hollywood so long to come knocking.
Variety say that Mike Nichols (CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR, CLOSER) has been tapped up by Miramax to direct a remake of the Kurosawa classic. He will be working from a screenplay by the great playwright David Mamet, a script that has been shelved since 1999 when then producer Scott Rudin and executive producer Martin Scorsese hit legal trouble from Kurosawa’s estate when trying to make a Hollywood version of the tale.
Legal trouble is something you want to avoid with Kurosawa. Virtually all of Sergio Leone’s money from making A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS in the mid 60’s went to Kurosawa, after his blatant remake of the Japanese helmer’s Samuari movie YOJIMBO fringed copyright.
I believe Kurosawa made more money from DOLLARS than he did from his own movie and certainly more than Leone ended up making.
That trouble though according to the trade has now passed and Rudin & Scorsese have resurrected the project and quickly hired Nichols to direct.
At this point you say… well THE SEVEN SAMURAI (which is actually up for a remake again with The Weinsteins) was made into THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. But is it really a good idea to remake Kurosawa?
In this case I say yes. Much like Martin Scorsese’s THE DEPARTED, the original plot is so ripe and a great hook that it could definitely work in this environment. I actually wish Scorsese was the one to direct.
But you really do owe it to yourself to see HIGH AND LOW. Get the criterion too, it’s one of the best DVD sets of the year!
One Comment
That’s just sad.
It’ll probably be in colour also, which would completely kill a “certain” scene.
The Departed was good but I still can’t shake the feeling that it was simply a waste of time. I still think the original was far better, Scorsese just showed the new-age directors that a modern remake doesn’t have to suck but I really think he could have spent the time making a movie of his own that would have been better.
I don’t actually mind Mike Nichols but he’s nowhere near as good as Kurosawa, or Scorsese or heck even Sergio Leone.
Damn Hollywood, and damn people who scoff at subtitles.