Interview: A Conversation w/ Don Cheadle About His Miles Davis Film

Don Cheadle is roughly a week into the Indiegogo campaign for his long-in-development Miles Davis biopic, "Miles Ahead," seeking to raise $325,000 towards the film's overall budget of under $10 million.

Interview by Shadow and Act

While promoting the campaign, Cheadle spoke with Shadow And Act about starring, producing, co-writing, and making his feature directorial debut with the film including several new details about the casting and creative choices.

SHADOW AND ACT: Can you talk about the journey you've had over the years trying to get the film made. What kind of response have you gotten as you've met with studios and financiers? Are there any concessions you've been asked to make creatively, or has the hold up largely been due to funding?

DON CHEADLE: It's been all of it. The project first had traction in 2008 when Miles was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and his nephew told reporters that I was going to be playing him in the movie, which was the first I'd heard of it. People started calling to try and put the movie together because the family had given their blessing for me to be in it. I started working with writers and at that point it became clear that the take on the story that I wanted to do was going to have to be controlled by me. I couldn't really translate it to someone else and have it come off in the way that I wanted and needed it to.

So we had a script very early that we went out with, and a lot of people bid on it and several studios had optioned it. And then the world collapsed - the financial crisis hit and a lot of those mini-majors went out of business. We were kind of left without a home at that point, which turned out to be, for us, a good period of time because we pulled the movie back and restructured it and brought on Steven Baigelman ("Get On Up", "Feeling Minnesota") who I co-wrote the movie with, and created a different story.

At that point we went out again with it, and again had a lot of bites and a lot of places that were trying to put it together. And we just finally settled on making it with the financier that we have now, and are again in earnest targeting a start date and casting it, and now we're four weeks out......

.....S&A: Can you tell us about what you're going for stylistically, with the look and feel of the film?

DC: Those are a lot of the decisions that are being made right now as we prep it - which medium are we going to use, film versus digital. Those are the discussions that we're having right now. We're shooting the film in Cincinnati, which is advantageous for several different reasons. Given the architecture of the city, it's New York without dealing with the expense and the hurdles that New York presents. So all of that stuff is being cobbled together now, from design to wardrobe to music.

S&A: What can you tell us about using Miles Davis' music in the film? What particular albums are you looking at, and how will it be used?

DC: It's almost all of Miles Davis' music, from stuff off of the Kind of Blue album, some stuff off of Circle in the Round, Jack Johnson, Bitches Brew, the Porgy and Bess album that he did with Gil Evans. There's a lot of his music that we're using, almost exclusively his music. Although the soundtrack, which will be done in post, will feature other musicians from other disciplines as well, because that was Miles too.

S&A: We recently saw an announcement looking for vehicles from the '40s to the '70s for the film, even though the synopsis says it takes place over a few days. Can we expect to see flashbacks and perhaps, a younger actor cast to play a younger Miles Davis?

DC: "Flashback" would be the general term, but they don't feel like that and they're not dealt with like that in the movie. It's not sort of a ripple fade, go back and see why and how he got there. It's more of a parallel journey that's happening that's looking at Miles' 10-year relationship with Frances Taylor Davis, from '56 to '66. So the flashbacks aren't used to paint a cradle-to-grave depiction. We don't meet Miles when he's eight years old and see the first time he picked up a trumpet; we're not doing that. It's centered around his relationship with Frances.

Read more of the interview: http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/interview-don-cheadle-says-zoe-saldana-is-out-of-miles-davis-biopic-almost-all-of-davis-music-will-be-used-in-the-film