Variety.com reports:
"Mike Nichols is set to direct a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s "High and Low" for Miramax Films.
Written by David Mamet and produced by Scott Rudin, the film hasn’t started casting. Martin Scorsese originally commissioned Mamet to write the screenplay back in 1999; it took two years for Rudin to pull the rights together. Scorsese likely will executive produce.
Kurosawa’s 1963 detective thriller starring Toshiro Mifune was based on the Ed McBain novel "King’s Ransom," about a businessman who is ruined when he honorably pays ransom to kidnappers who mistakenly nabbed his driver’s son."
"High and Low" is one of my favorite films of Kurosawa's and in general. I remember staggering out of the theatre after having seen this film and being unable to fully express its effect on me. How I got home that night is a blur, but I do remember writing about the film into the wee small hours that same evening. Unfortunately, my hard drive failed and I lost all of my documents. Otherwise, I'd inflict it on you.
Toshiro Mifune's performance in it is unlike those of his other films in which he plays characters who seem to have everybody's number down (the roving, opportunist samurai in Yojimbo, the Yakuza boss in Drunken Angel, the vengeful son-in-law in The Bad Sleep Well, etc). As iconic as Mifune has become to us, even his screen presence is overshadowed in the film by the constant reiteration of class disparities in post-war Japan and the poverty of the lower classes. High and Low anticipates the investigations of wealth, poverty and commodification in post-war Japan seen in the films of Shohei Imamura, Seijun Suzuki and Nagisa Oshima. It's a cinematic masterpiece.
The people who have been assembled for this project reads like the movie industry equivalent of the Traveling Wilburys, but it doesn't neccessarily mean they can make a version better than Kurosawa's.
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