Denzel Washington knows “all money ain’t good money” – but sometimes you’ve got to put food on the table.

The tag line for Spike Lee’s latest film “Highest 2 Lowest,” in which Washington stars as a music mogul caught in a ransom plot on the eve of a big business deal, had the two-time Oscar winner reflecting on past money jobs in an interview with CNN.

“My mother used to say, ‘Do what you gotta do, so that you can do what you want to do’ – it’s not the other way around,” he recalled.

“When we had four children, I was doing stuff I had to do. You go back and look in the mid-’90s – I won’t mention any movies, I’ll just say the mid-’90s, around there.”

“A couple (of movies) for the kids?” chimed in Jeffrey Wright, Washington’s co-star.

“More than a couple for the kids – and the wife, and the house, and the bank, and everybody else,” Washington replied.

A quick sweep of his credits around then and you’ll find a few duds, sure, but there’s also “Crimson Tide,” “Philadelphia” and “The Pelican Brief” (surely he doesn’t mean these). And at either end of the ’90s, two Spike Lee collaborations, “He Got Game” (1998) and their masterpiece, “Malcolm X” (1992). Washington’s career has been nothing if not consistently packed with gems. As for his kids, the money jobs paid dividends: John David and Olivia are successful actors, Malcolm a film director, and Katia is a producer.

“Highest 2 Lowest” is Lee and Washington’s fifth film together. The actor brought the script, a reimagining of Akira Kurosawa classic “High To Low” (1963) – itself based on 1959 novel “King’s Ransom” by Evan Hunter – to the director, for what would be their first collaboration since 2006’s “Inside Man.”

Transposing the story of a Japanese shoe executive to the New York music business, many of the key elements remain. Washington’s record exec David King believes his son has been kidnapped, only to learn the kidnapper (A$AP Rocky) has mistakenly taken the son of his chauffer Paul (Jeffrey Wright). Should King still pay the ransom, even if it drains his bank accounts, scuppering plans for him to buy back control of his company? What was a clear-cut decision when he thought it was his own flesh and blood is muddied when it’s someone else’s child.

Interestingly, there’s more than a little of Spike Lee in David. Both are cultural titans at a stage in their careers when they’re weighing their legacy with an unquenchable thirst to create. Both are balancing art and commerce, and the event horizon of tech pulling their industries in new directions. Both happen to have exquisite personal art collections – in fact, the production made copies of paintings by Jean-Paul Basquiat, Tim Okamura and Kehinde Wiley, among others, which really do belong to Lee.

But whereas Lee has embraced his industry’s newest players – “Da 5 Bloods” was distributed by Netflix in 2020, and “Highest 2 Lowest” will debut on Apple TV+ after A24 distributes theatrically – King is a leerier of tech disruption. He rails at soulless AI-generated music, new artists trying to gain a following on social media, and his son’s Instagram addiction.

“I think we’d all be better off without those addictives in our lives,” offered Wright. “We were promised harmony; that technology was going to make us wiser, more democratic, more peaceful. That has not been the case. In fact, it’s been the opposite. I think it’s something we should give some thought to: Where are we going with all this?”

Does Washington share any of the same concerns as his character? In a word: no.

“They don’t affect me to the degree that they affect the character, because I don’t rely on those things for my happiness or my peace,” he reflected. “I don’t make money off those kinds of things.”

“I don’t need to be known, you know? I like being quiet,” he added.

The acting legend, who was baptized and became a minister at the end of 2024, has entered his zen era, content to reel off aphorisms about fame and filmmaking; taking shots while walking backwards into his own mystique.

“If they see you for free all week, they won’t pay for you at the weekend,” he said. It’s the same warning he reportedly gave to Michael B. Jordan about the danger of movie star over-exposure.

So no, don’t go looking for him on Instagram, or anywhere else but the big (or small) screen.

“All those so-called Instagram accounts, if my name is connected it, you’ve been had. You’ve been took. Hoodwinked. Bamboozled,” he said, gleefully.

“Highest 2 Lowest” is released in US cinemas on August 15 before debuting