Don Cheadle: Why I Had to Make My Miles Davis Movie

This all sort of starts at Miles’ induction at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, right?
That’s where it officially starts, yeah. But it’s funny, because there had been a lot of folks saying “Do you know who you should play in a movie?” over the years. The first group of writers I worked with, Chris Wilkinson and Stephen J. Rivelle — they’d written Ali. I’d auditioned for a part in that movie and Chris, who’s a big Miles aficionado, was going, “Man! You could really play Miles Davis. I know the family, it’s something you should think about doing.” And I was like, “Well, if there’s something that happens that makes sense, let me know.” But it was always cursory statements.

Then when Miles was getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, a reporter asked Miles’ nephew, Vince Wilburn, about a Davis movie. The response was something like “Only one actor can play my uncle in a film, and that’s Don Cheadle! And he’s going to be doing it soon!” Which was news to me.

Do you not have any input into your career or your choice of roles?
Right? “Well, guys, that’s not usually how this works, so…” “No, Don, you’ve already been cast, here’s when we need you on set.” [Laughs] But I thought, well, let me meet with the family. They pitched me a few ideas, which were … kinda standard. I felt I’d seen it before.

“To get this film financed, we needed a white co-star. And until Ewan came on, until we had cast the proper white co-star, there was no Miles Davis movie. There was no Miles Ahead. That means something. That’s the reality.”

Typical cradle-to-grave stuff?
Some of that, yeah; one concept was to focus on the five women in his life that he loved and use that as a framework. I told them, “Thanks for thinking of me, but I’m really not vibing off of any of these ideas.”

Then, almost as an afterthought, I said, “I think we’ve got to make a movie about this dude as a gangster” — ’cause that’s how I feel about Miles Davis. He’s a G. All those apocryphal stories about how bold and dynamic he was, the gangster shit he’d do … you could fit all that into a biopic, I guess. But I just thought, let’s do a movie that Miles Davis would say, ‘I want to be the star of that movie. Not the one about me. The one where I’m the fucker running it, and I tell everybody what happens.'” Take the music he made in 1950 and put it over scenes set in 1978, or take his 1965 album and drop it into 1945. Just do it without the constraints of any rules. Make some mistakes, go crazy, crash into a wall — anything but something fucking cookie-cutter.