Denzel Washington on ageing, AI panic and the final act of his career: "Time marches on"

“I will say that as I approached my 70th birthday, between the 65th and 70th birthdays, and understanding and starting to feel like there is some end to this, [I asked myself] ‘Who would I like to work with before I finish?’” he says, when we meet over Zoom in the very week his latest movie Highest 2 Lowest has just received its New York premiere. “It’s just where I was at in life, where I am in life, where I was then in life…who do I want to work with?”

It’s wise thinking from Washington, an actor who has played so many great men in his career – from Steve Biko to Malcolm X to the (semi) fictional lawyer in Philadelphia who fights the corner for Tom Hanks's AIDS victim. No wonder he’s lining up some of the best directors in the world for his curtain call. “I’m about to work with Fernando Meirelles and I’m about to work with Ryan Coogler,” he reveals. “And we haven’t found the right thing yet, but I’ve been talking with Steve McQueen.”

That’s quite a line up right there. Just the thought of Washington teaming up with Britain’s McQueen, the director of Shame and 12 Years a Slave, is mouthwatering. Before that possibility, Washington is readying for Here Come the Flood, a heist thriller by Brazilian City of God director Meirelles. And then there’s the prospect of him joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Coogler directing him in an as-yet unspecified role in Black Panther 3 (Washington recently revealed that he had to call Coogler and apologise for blurting this secret out).

For the moment, though, he’s revelling in Highest 2 Lowest, a film that marks his fifth collaboration with the irrepressible Spike Lee. The film is a “re-interpretation”, as Lee has pointed out, of the 1963 thriller High and Low by Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa, itself a take on Ed McBain’s pulp novel. Here, the story is transposed to modern-day New York, with Washington playing David King, the head of a record label, Stackin’ Hits Records. He’s about to strike a major business deal when tragedy strikes: he hears his son has been kidnapped.

As anyone who has seen High and Low will know, that’s not quite the case: the abductor has snatched the wrong boy – in this case, the son of King’s long-term friend Paul (Jeffrey Wright). Suddenly, King’s in a bind: pay the expensive ransom on behalf of his friend or risk the boy dying. Intriguingly, it wasn’t Lee that initiated the project. “The material came to me before it came to Spike,” reveals Washington. “And I said, ‘No question. I gotta call my boy. Bang.’ And here we are.”

The actor points out that their film differs from the original, what with the kidnap victim a teenager rather than a child. “Ours is a different set of circumstances the way the story is written. But I think it hit on something interesting by talking about the boy being older because he’s at the cusp of manhood, when all those dangers are there, and he can see and understand what his father is and isn’t doing. And we get to see the world through the eyes of our young people today. So I think that was a wise decision, which makes for more fertile drama.”

With this aim of curating the final years of his career, Washington says it’s “no coincidence” that he went to Lee, who has form in remaking Asian movie classics (think of his 2013 take on the South Korean revenge drama Oldboy). Their collaborations stretch back thirty-five years to 1990’s jazz tale Mo’ Better Blues, though Washington has no wish to reflect on how their relationship has changed. “I don’t analyse like that. I don’t think of other people like that, or how much they’ve changed. I don’t know.” He pauses. “Well, we have gotten older. Our knees hurt more!”

His appreciation and admiration for Lee is huge, however. “Spike was the first director I worked with that would make a documentary in the middle of making a film, in the middle of making a documentary, in the middle of making a film. So you’d be shooting Mo’ Better… while he’s shooting Robin Harris doing stand-up. He’s in the movie, but he’s also just shooting him doing his stand-up. So there were moments like that in our relationship, over the five films where I would see, ‘Oh, he’s always aware.’ He’s aware of more than just the character in the script. He’s aware of the culture in a way that an actor doesn’t have to think about.”

Since then, they reunited for 1992’s epic activist biopic Malcolm X – a film and a Washington performance that Lee believes will stand “the test of time”. Six years later, they followed it with basketball drama He Got Game before coming together for a fourth outing, 2006’s Inside Man, a bank robbery tale that became the biggest hit of Lee’s career. Since then, Lee worked with Washington’s son John David Washington on his Oscar-winning BlacKKKlansman. But it’s only now, almost two decades since their last encounter, that they’re back for Highest 2 Lowest.

Washington is no stranger to remakes – 2014’s violent The Equalizer and its two sequels stems from the 1980s TV show about a vigilante, while he even took on The Magnificent Seven, a take on the classic 1960 western that itself was based on another Kurosawa film, Seven Samurai. As with The Magnificent Seven, the actor took the same approach when it came to High and Low. “I didn’t study it. It really wasn’t going to affect what it was I was doing. We had a different story. I mean, inspired by that story, and I didn’t want to see something that I really liked, and then then go, ‘Oh, I don’t want to imitate it.’”

While Kurosawa’s High and Low starred Toshiro Mifune as the head of a shoe company, Highest 2 Lowest deals with the modern-day music industry. Fame, we’re told, is the only currency. “I don’t know what the deep meaning is, but I mean, it’s just increasingly the world we live in. How many followers, how much fame, and you can monetize that?” says Washington, whose own breakthrough as a youngster came through more traditional means, treading the boards in theatre and later, on television, in the popular medical drama St Elsewhere.

Yet, he understands that even in his day, fame sometimes came to the undeserving. “It’s easy to say to ‘Oh, back in the day, you had to have talent to become famous’, but there were just different ways of creating fame, then, maybe more behind-the-scenes, strings being pulled. Even in the studio system, back in the day, a hundred years ago, it wasn’t necessarily the most talented actors and actresses [that shone], but they could make stars. Now wannabe stars can make themselves.”

He considers for a second. “Or at least, people think they can make themselves stars. I guess it’s just more people have access now [to instant exposure]…you had to come through the studio or come through something before.” Certainly, social media has allowed people to showcase their talents – with Lee even admitting that he cast smaller roles in the film by seeking people on Instagram. The crossover between film and music is also deeply apparent, with the casting of rappers A$AP Rocky and Ice Spice in key roles.

If Lee’s film is brash and sometimes over-the-top, it also touches on pertinent topics currently plaguing the entertainment business, including the use of Artificial Intelligence. Washington merely shrugs at the mention of AI and its impact. “Time marches on. The technology is the technology,” he says, well aware that the furore currently surrounding AI – whether its used to generate scripts or even replicate performances – is the same panic that spread with the arrival of other technologies. “That’s what they said about radio two hundred years ago.”

The use of AI in movies may not fully be initiated until after Washington has retired but he’s not worried. “The difference is we have a soul, heart. We can be hurt, and we can react and create based on our pain. I don’t know if a machine can do that yet. Can they feel? It’s called feelings. You have to feel something. Not just imitate something. You have to feel it. So I don’t know if they figured that out yet, but we’re just at the infant level of it, like they were at the infancy of radio or the infancy of television or the infancy of computers.” Surely, a machine will struggle to replicate the power and potency of a Denzel Washington performance.

Highest 2 Lowest is in cinemas and on Apple TV+ from Friday 5th September – sign up to Apple TV+ now.

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