The last time we caught up with Don Cheadle, he was still recovering from "too many late nights on The Guard" and was already deep into pre-production on his decade-in-the-making Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead. Today, he's in London, and finally, he's recovering from "too many late nights on Miles Ahead", a film which he stars in, directed, produced and co-wrote.
Labour of love doesn’t begin to cover it. In 2006, Miles Davis had been inaugurated into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when his nephew, Vince Wilburn Jr, mentioned that Don Cheadle would be essaying his late uncle in a film: it was news to Cheadle.
“The idea had been floating around,” says the 51-year-old. “People who had played with Miles had said it to me. Quincy Troupe [Davis’s biographer] had said it.”
Although not a trumpeter by trade, Cheadle was certainly an ideal call. The Missouri-born musician-turned-actor spent much of his youth transcribing Charlie Parker albums so that he might master the saxophone.
He was not a little ambitious.
“It’s the only way you get any good,” he laughs. “I was into Miles Davis pretty early because it was music that my parents listened to. And because I started playing sax pretty early – 11 or 12. I was looking for all the great musicians: not just on that instrument but all instruments. I wanted to be that good. I wanted to hear all these seminal records from leaders that went on to create their own genres.
“From the early architects of that sound – Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie – the mastery was evident. Here were soloists doing improv that was, on the sly, as structured and intricate and intellectual as anything you could hear. It was like listening to magic happen.”
Years of research
Understandably, Cheadle was well enough disposed toward the notion of a Miles biopic to meet with the family. Years of research followed: "I was with the family a lot: his nephew, his son. I was with his first wife Frances a lot. There's a huge amount of source material – home movies, radio, his music, books."
Armed with all this information, the co-writer and director promptly excised it.
“We did use it,” he explains. “But within our own tight framework. I had no interest in making a straight cradle-to-grave film. This was a man who used to come up behind Herbie [Hancock] and take his left hand away from the keyboard. Just to see what he would come up with. I needed to make something innovative and crazy to reflect how innovative and crazy he was. Anything else would have been an affront to Miles.”
Early in the film Miles Ahead (named after the trumpeter's 1957 album with Gil Evans), Cheadle's gravel-voiced Davis tells a rock-journalist chancer (Ewan McGregor): "If you're going to tell a story, come at with some attitude." Cheadle, accordingly, eschews a career that, by Davis's own account, ripped up the playbook for music "five or six times".
“There’s rock and hip hop and funk and R&B,” notes Cheadle. “He touched on everything. And he changed everything.”
At the moment when Miles Ahead is set, Miles Davis is not changing anything: some five years have passed since the trumpeter's 1975 breakdown and his recording career looks to be over. Miles Ahead skips between the late 1950s, when Davis was courting his future wife Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), and the drug-fuelled paranoia of these lost post-Dark Magus years.
Enter dodgy Dave (McGregor) who disrupts Davis’s hermitage in search of a story, only to become embroiled in a psychedelic caper concerning a dastardly Svengali, a younger trumpeting rival, and a demo tape that might just be Davis’s latest masterpiece.
“I wanted to create something that touched on lots of genres, like he did,” explains Cheadle. “I wanted it to feel like it was a Miles Davis composition. Almost like you’re walking inside one. Or walking inside his creativity.”
That places Miles Ahead inside an elite sub-genre that includes Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, an elite sub-genre that isn't a particularly easy sell when it comes to attracting financial backers.
Fell into place “Once we knew what it was and how we were going to design and structure it – it kind of fell into place,” says Cheadle. “But we had to keep coming back for financial reasons. You know: if you can get it down to X amount of money. We had to keep trying to jump through hoops for financiers.”
He finally turned to the crowdfunding site Indiegogo, where fans donated $350,000, just enough to cover the shortfall when one of the film’s investors pulled out.
“Every dollar of that is on the screen,” says Cheadle. “That was critical. We had the script and the script was the bible and that bible was written years before we came to make this film. So we knew what the drill was. And that drill was stay disciplined and be specific. We didn’t have any time to waste. We shot this movie in 30 working days with six weeks prep for under $10 million. We ended up shooting as many takes as we could. We didn’t have the whole cast the whole time. We had Ewan and Michael Stuhlbarg for a few days and then they were gone. We had Emayatzy for a few days and then she was gone. We had not a lot of wriggle room. But a lot of constraints and limitations.”
It doesn’t sound as if Marvel’s War Machine will be re-enlisting for the auteur experience anytime soon: “This was definitely something I needed to complete. But it was a long process. Four or five years ago, I tried to find a director and there was a part of me that would have been relieved if that part – at least– could have gone away. This was ultimately probably not the smartest way to do it. But it turned out that it was the only way that we could do it.”
Happily, Cheadle’s portrait of the troubled genius was worth the effort. Throughout the picture, there’s something of a curled rattlesnake about Davis, something that repeatedly calls to mind certain unforgivabe things he wrote about his first wife Frances Taylor and how he treated her.
Despite the involvement of the Davis estate and various family members, no one could say that Cheadle has fashioned a hagiography.
“Why would you make a saintly portrait? Then everyone would ask: Why did you make a saintly portrait? You can’t win for losing. I didn’t have to worry about sanitising Miles because Miles himself never did. He owned what he did. So pussyfooting around wasn’t required.”
On previous projects, Cheadle has often had the good fortune to meet the people he is portraying: he consulted Paul Rusesabagina for his Oscar-nominated turn in Hotel Rwanda and basketball player Earl Manigault for the HBO biopic Rebound. He saw Davis live in concert in 1982. What would Cheadle have asked Davis, who died in 1991, if he had had the chance?
“I would have asked: What’s next? Right before he died he was recording music with Prince. And I imagine if he were alive, he’d be interested in working with Kamasi Washington, he’d be interested in Kendrick, and he’d probably still be playing with Herbie and Wayne.”
