Don Cheadle Q&A: How He Convinced Miles Davis’ Family to Make a Non-Traditional Biopic

Don Cheadle was never interested in making a standard-issue Miles Davis biopic. In fact, for a while there, he wasn’t interested in making any kind of Miles Davis biopic whatsoever. Instead, he was hoping to play the musician in someone else’s film. But years after being rumored to star in a Davis biopic, Cheadle eventually came on board to co-write, direct, produce and star in what would become the year’s most inventive biopic. Cheadle’s “Miles Ahead” isn’t just another routine take the troubled life of a gifted musician; instead, it’s an ambitious and tangential tone poem that aims to recapture Davis’ essence.

Billed as “an exploration of the life and music of Miles Davis,” the film is set in the seventies, when Davis famously retreated from public life and did very little in the way of creating. Ewan McGregor stars as fictional Rolling Stone reporter Dave Braden, who makes it his mission to track down the star and get the scoop about his current situation. Loosely structured as a buddy comedy, the film finds the initially reticent Davis eventually warming to Braden as the two embark on some wild — and wildly embellished — adventures around New York City. It also occasionally zips back in time, blurs into flashbacks and ends with Cheadle-as-Davis working it in the present day. Needless to say, it’s anything but a straightforward biopic, which is exactly what Cheadle thinks Davis would have wanted.

READ MORE: NYFF Review: Don Cheadle’s ‘Miles Ahead’ Isn’t Really a Miles Davis Biopic

Indiewire recently sat down with Cheadle to talk about his creative process in making a very creative film, how he juggled acting and directing on set and what he hopes audiences to get out of his bold new film.

The film has played extensively on the festival circuit since last year. Are you just bursting to bring it to theatrical audiences?

Am I bursting to get in a sleeping bag and zip it up and then hibernate for three months? Yeah. [laughs]. We’ve been to Berlin, we’ve also gone to SXSW, the Pan-African Film Festival, Sundance, all that [laughs]. Yeah, it’s been a lot of airplanes and car rides and hotels.

And talking about it?

And talking about it. But it’s going to be all original, everything I say today I will have never said before. [laughs]
When did you realize that you had to make a movie about Miles?

Well, it wasn’t something that I was chasing in any way, shape or form. It was really something that was chasing me. And that I’d heard, spoken about and people that mentioned it to me in different places. Miles was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They were interviewing his nephew and he said, “We’re going to do a movie about his life and Don Cheadle is going to play him” [laughs]. So that’s when it became unofficially official.

I met with the family and they pitched me ideas, and I countered and pitched my idea about the film and how I wanted to do it. And they said “that’s great” and I said, “Okay, great. When someone pitches that movie to you and can make that movie, call me and I would love to play the part,” and it just became apparent kind of quickly that in order for that to happen, I was going to have to be the person to write it, the person to direct it.

When you first spoke with the family, were their ideas for the film more straightforward?

Yeah, I felt that they were. I felt that they were more things that we’d seen done before. I didn’t think that necessarily the experience of the movie itself would feel like Miles Davis. And that’s what I wanted. I felt like the movies were sort of about the record of Miles Davis’ life and the things that he had done — Cliff Notes of his life, in a way. Not something that would be experiential, which is what I wanted it to be.

How did you land on this more experimental approach?

I didn’t always have the idea because it wasn’t anything that I really thought about in earnest until the day before I had to go meet them. They said, “How would you do this movie?” And I said, “To me, it just has to be something that’s like Miles Davis’ music. It has to be as expansive, and creative and have the ability to go everywhere like his music does.”

Miles’ music [ranges] from funk to trag-jazz to swing to bepop to rock to hip-hop, I mean, he touched all of that. So I said, “All of that has to be a part of the movie and I don’t know how you can get all that music to be a part of the movie, unless the movie also feels like it’s a part of all of that.” I want them to feel that they relate and I said, “I want to make a movie that Miles would want to star in, as opposed to a movie that’s just about Miles.”  It was “Miles Davis: Don Cheadle is Miles Davis as Miles Davis in…” That’s what I wanted it to be.

Was the family excited about that?

Yeah, excited and cautious. It was a bit of a dance, because I was asking permission to do something that no one had ever suggested to them before and that is not really the way to traditionally deal with a historical figure on film.
Once they said, “Okay, you can do it,” and signed on the dotted line, I could do whatever I wanted. But I wanted them close and I wanted them to be a part of it. I wanted them to tell me how to shape it as well as challenge them to allow me to push it, because I think that’s what Miles would have wanted.

That’s always how I came back to them when there would be any sort of moment of, “Are we really going to do this and not talk about John Coltrane? Are we really not going to talk about modality versus bepop? Are we really not going to check these boxes like these other movies would do?” I’d say, “Do you think Miles wants something closer to those movies that he has actually been on record saying he didn’t really like, or do you think he’d want to have something that felt more gangster and crazy and funky and wild and expressionistic and impressionistic?” And they’d always go, “Yeah, that.” I’d say, “Okay, so let’s do that. Let’s do that.”