Q&A: Don Cheadle on avoiding a CliffsNotes biopic of jazz legend Miles Davis

TORONTO – Don Cheadle admits his unconventional Miles Davis biopic, “Miles Ahead,” is not for everyone.

In fact, he’s expecting some people will reject it outright for including fantasy sequences, playing with timelines, and daring to invent a caper that puts the jazz legend at the centre of a wild gun battle and car chase.

The “House of Lies” and “Iron Man 3” actor — who stars, directed, co-wrote and produced “Miles Ahead” — says he wasn’t interested in crafting a strict biography.

“I wanted something different,” Cheadle said this week as the film heads to Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on Friday, before opening in other cities.

“And yeah, every minute I thought, ‘I don’t know if this is going to connect with people.'”

Reached in Los Angeles, Cheadle chatted about scraping the project together, becoming a director, and the appeal of bombastic Marvel popcorn flicks.

The Canadian Press: You put so much of yourself into this project, what did it mean personally to get it made?

Cheadle: Different things at different times. This is 10 years ago, I guess, that it was first brought to my attention from Vince Wilburn, Miles’s nephew…. Between then and now there’s been a lot of fits and starts and we thought we were down the road with several people and (saw) those opportunities evaporate. Finally, we were able to secure financing with, as my agent likes to say, “irrational investors,” and go forward.

And through a lot of different things — social, crowdfunding and me putting in money, friends putting in money, me deferring all my fees, shooting in Cincinnati with the rebate, all of the things that had to come into play — we were able to get it going.

CP: What do you want people to know about Miles?

Cheadle: To me, the star of Miles’s life is always his music and I wanted to create a narrative that would allow us to really explore that a lot. And come up with a story that would support us using a lot of different music from a lot of different timelines and a lot of different genres and having all of that fuse itself into the storytelling in a way that propels the narrative.

CP: Hence using fantasy?

Cheadle: Just trying to be creative about it. As I said to the family right off the bat, I said: I want to make a movie that Miles Davis would want to star in, much more than I want to make a movie that attempts to do kind of a CliffsNotes version of his life or just hit the highlights and lowlights and try to jam it all in.

I wanted to do what Miles did (but) with my medium, which is play what’s not there. “Fear no mistakes for there are none” — all of the things that Miles used to talk about, about how to approach music — I wanted to approach cinema in the same way.

CP: Is that why you took on so many roles — as producer, co-writer, director and star?

Cheadle: Well, I tried to give it away, I mean I tried to give parts of it away. At some point during this process, hearing “No’s” and it being such a struggle, I thought, “Well, maybe the impediment is the fact I’m a first-time director and this material seems challenging and people aren’t sure about it. Maybe we just need to get another director in here.”

And I tried to hire another director, I tried to offload that part of it but I couldn’t. Thankfully that didn’t happen and it all came back to me. Though it did take a toll in pushing it through.

CP: Can you get the same creative satisfaction from doing a big Marvel project like your upcoming War Machine role in “Captain America: Civil War”?

Cheadle: Oh, sure. But that’s just because I like different experiences. I get something out of all that fun, stunty flying, cool big action (stuff). It’s fun for me, too.

— This interview has been edited and condensed.