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‘Where's the bag?' Inside the high-octane chase scene on ‘Highest 2 Lowest' inspired by ‘The French Connection'
The highlight of Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee's reinvention of Akira Kurosawa's classic crime thriller High and Low, is the high-octane New York subway ransom drop-off and police chase to retrieve the $17.5 million in Swiss francs belonging to music mogul David King (Denzel Washington).
King grapples with the same moral dilemma as his shoe magnate counterpart in High and Low played by Toshiro Mifune: whether or not to pay the ransom to save the son of his best friend and chauffeur (Jeffrey Wright), who was kidnapped instead of King's son by mistake. Once he's all in, King must deliver the ransom bag on a 6 Train from Borough Hall in Brooklyn to the Bronx — and it's off to the races.
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But to spice it up, Lee looked to another classic crime thriller with two iconic subway chases (on foot and by car) for inspiration: William Friedkin's The French Connection. Fortunately, the director's partner in crime was go-to cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Inside Man), who's equally adept at shooting kinetic action as eye-popping character drama.
'I think it's the signature of a Spike Lee Joint to show New York off as a character,' Libatique tells Gold Derby. 'It should get a beginning credit. And The French Connection is something that inspired Spike from the very beginning. We tend to revisit some classic New York films when we're about to shoot something here. We did a similar thing in Inside Man [with Dog Day Afternoon]. The whole subway travel fit the The French Connection vibe, but Spike made that sequence so multilayered, and it's got a lot of New York in it.'
While King and NYPD detectives ride the 6 Train, they're accompanied by rowdy Yankee fans traveling to a day game against the hated Boston Red Sox. 'The scene climaxes in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, and you're in the middle of a Puerto Rican Day celebration [featuring the late Eddie Palmieri and his Salsa Orchestra],' adds Libatique. This is followed by an elaborately choreographed NYPD pursuit of the kidnappers who are on mopeds, and the confusing back-and-forth exchange of the ransom bag.
To recreate the gritty, documentary-like texture of The French Connection, the tour-de-force action sequences were shot across multiple formats with a preponderance of hand-held shots: digital, 16mm and Super 8. This was in sharp contrast to the all-digital first half of the film, which takes place at King's elegant penthouse at the Olympia Dumbo overlooking the East River in Brooklyn (shot inside a set utilizing an LED wall outside its large windows).
"So the minute he leaves the confines of his luxurious home, we introduced 16mm and Super 8 in an effort to metaphor the outside world being open, unprotected, and less sheltered,' explains Libatique. The idea was to convey a visual messiness with this multi-format experiment, so he tried to include all three formats within a sequence. 'The moment they leave the house, there's a shot when they arrive at Borough Hall and there's a profile dolly track that takes them into the subway. That was our first 16mm shot,' he says. 'The Super 8 was kind of B-roll in a way, just getting moments to round out the atmosphere of the Puerto Rican Day celebration.'
The entire sequence involving the subway ride, the Puerto Rican Day celebration, and the moped chase took a week to shoot. "So for that entirety of the travel, we basically shot on two different platforms and just changed signs out from, say, 14th Union Square to 42nd Street, and changed the angles because we had to make it work for every stop within two platforms,' Libatique explains. "And we would travel back and forth on the subway. We would travel to stops and then we shoot going the opposite direction. When we reset, we would just flip everybody so it looked like they were on the same ride.'
Meanwhile, the Puerto Rican Day celebration covering four blocks was pure Lee in terms of soaking up atmospheric detail, particularly the street vendors. They started shooting actors Rosie Perez and Anthony Ramos introducing Palmieri, followed by quite a few setups of the band performing. 'We got Eddie while he was very energetic,' Libatique recalls. 'And then we focused on the crowd and we put up four cameras to get as much as possible with one Super 8 camera going and getting the person who made the crushed ices, the person who's crushing the sugar cane.'
Then there was the tricky moped chase across another four blocks, relying again on a lot of hand-held camera work. 'Where's the first bag going?' adds Libatique. 'So you see somebody dancing and then they stop dancing, they catch the bag and then they toss it over to another guy, who reaches over a fence and hands it to a guy on a moped. And the whole sequence begins again. But we didn't realize that it's very difficult to ride a moped one-handed while you're handing off a bag to another person.'
But right before the last moped flips over a car, the director and cinematographer were both following in a fast-moving car with a camera extension. This apparently was a first for Lee, who sat shotgun while Libatique handled the camera in the back. 'We do one take where we scream around the corner and we come to a dead stop right before the stunt,' he recalls. 'And Spike just gets out of the car, looks back at me, and says, 'No, thanks, that's too much for me.'"
Adds Libatique, who doesn't get enough time off for snowboarding or surfing, 'I have to get my thrill rides on set.'
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