‘Miles Ahead’ Star Don Cheadle On His Anti-Biopic, the Cautionary Tale of ‘Walk Hard’ and the Future of ‘Captain Planet’

Don Cheadle in ‘Miles Ahead’ (Sony Pictures Classics)

Don Cheadle wrote, directed, produced, and stars in Miles Ahead, a drama with a caper-esque twist that finds jazz legend Miles Davis in the midst of a five-year musical abyss. Cheadle didn’t compose the film (that title goes to acclaimed pianist Robert Glasper), but he endeavored to create a piece of art that mirrored a Miles Davis number: one that’s challenging, soulful, improvisational, and unlike anything the star has done before — and unlike any biographical music film you’ve seen before.

Miles Ahead kicks off in 1979, as the revered trumpeter is holed up in his New York City digs, looking scraggly and disheveled, and with little company save for cocaine and booze. An unexpected visit from a Rolling Stone journalist (Ewan McGregor) sets off a bullet-riddled sequence as Davis’s record label (led by Michael Stuhlbarg’s dodgy producer) tries desperately to get ahold of the musician’s latest recording.

The movie, which premiered at last fall’s New York Film Festival and is playing in select theaters now was a passion project (“partly a compassion project,” Cheadle joked) for the first-time director, who played saxophone growing up. And even though Cheadle is an Oscar-nominated actor who currently stars in Marvel’s massively popular Avengers films (and will next be seen in May’s Captain America: Civil War), he struggled to bring Davis’s story to the big screen. Here, Cheadle talks about the challenges of his Miles-long journey, and much more.

Miles Davis has always been known as the epitome of cool. But in Miles Ahead, he’s pretty down and out. Was that an effort to challenge our perceptions of him?

Really we just picked this moment in time when he wasn’t playing, this five years that his talent and creativity were going fallow, to use it as a point of departure to get him back. So we wanted to find when that wasn’t happening and kind of have him on the precipice of failure or falling into obscurity, or seeing him burst out of this period of time with the new thing to say, and create a narrative that felt like a Miles Davis piece. As opposed to a biopic that’s trying to make sure it checked all the boxes.

You don’t care for the term biopic.

I guess in some ways you could call it that. I just think it sets up a false expectation, [where] people believe that they’re going to come to the theater and be able to walk away with some sort of overview that would allow them, mostly falsely, to think that they’ve now got that under control. Like if they then went and had a pop quiz, that they had just read the CliffsNotes and they would know how to fill in some blanks. I was much less interested in that than something that felt like a composition. Like we were walking around inside of Miles Davis’s brain and experiencing it.

Watch a scene from ‘Miles Ahead:’

It’s not Miles Davis 101, in other words.

Yeah, and I think a lot of quote-unquote biopics attempt to do that, and end up really giving short-shrift to each of those events and you just get a sort of cursory knowledge of any of them. … Everything for me was trying to be as Miles was, and approach my medium in a similar way to how he approached his medium. “Play what’s not there,” all these Miles Davis quotes. “Fear no mistakes, for there are none.” “Don’t go back, go forward.” “Don’t repeat, do the next thing.”

Both you and Aaron Sorkin, who wrote Steve Jobs, referenced the spoof Walk Hard when talking about how you feared writing a traditional biopic.

It was a terrifying cautionary tale, absolutely. We know all of these beats that movies about musicians often have to hit to satisfy this idea of being a biopic. That movie just brilliantly skewers every single aspect of that and makes you a little Twitter-pated. I hope nothing we do comes off like that, ‘cause it ain’t a comedy, per se.

What’s been your personal history with Miles Davis?

It’s music that’s definitely been part of my whole life, starting very early, being a saxophone player and playing jazz and coming up in bands. And wanting to understand that music and loving that music and being entertained by that music. It’s music of my youth — my parents listened to it, that’s how I probably became aware of it. It was probably happening in the background before I was even aware of it. Then once I did become aware of it, I sought it out and I wanted to understand it.

How did playing Miles Davis affect your own perception of him?

It’s just deepened my appreciation of his music, more than anything else. His approach to music, and his take on the creative process. And how committed he was to pursuing the thing that was driving him and pushing him forward. As opposed to what I think we see a lot of artists do, which is hit a sweet spot where they think they’ve got a lot of accolades from and fans responding, and go, “Well, let’s just pump 10 more of these out.” Miles, not dissimilar to someone like Bob Dylan, went, “I’m going this way with the music. If you guys wanna come, that’s great. If you don’t want to come, that’s great.”

Who do you think is carrying the torch for Miles these days in jazz — or “social music,” as he preferred to call it?

Well, musically, Kendrick [Lamar]. Kamasi Washington, those guys. Walter Smith III. There’s a lot of those cats. Robert Glasper, who composed our film. Mike Moreno. There are a lot of guys who are young who know what the roots are. The Roots! [Laughs] They know from whence they come and what they’re bringing forward. And then there’s hip-hop. We know that [A Tribe Called Quest] producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad knows what’s up, and Phife [Editor’s note: Rapper Malik Taylor, better known to fans as Phife Dawg, passed away from complication of diabetes on March 23] and Q-Tip. And J-Dilla and that whole camp that came up listening to [jazz] and finding ways to continue to incorporate it.

And the film of course marks your directorial debut. It’s a huge undertaking. How did the experience measure up against your expectations?

I don’t know what I expected, but no matter what I expected, it was four times as hard as I thought it was going to be [laughs]. No sleep ‘til Brooklyn. It was never-ending. As the writer-director, you’re the first one on, and still here, the last one, out in front of it trying to shepherd it into the world. So it is a huge undertaking.

You’ve talked about the fact that you had to cast a white actor to get the movie fully financed. It’s one of so many stories we’ve heard about the film industry’s resistance to diversity. With an increasing amount of attention on the issue, though, do you sense it’s getting any better?

I believe so. I think that these things have come up before, but maybe because it is coming from many, many different areas at once, and the timing of the super-bright light on the Oscars, and the timing of a police shooting tape coming out, and the timing of a national election and reactions and responses to what one candidate is saying about race, about foreigners, about us versus them… that these things are now just staying in the conversation. I think when that happens, there’s an opportunity for things to change. But change can happen incrementally, and it can happen very, very slowly.

Well I’m sure you’ve seen the 1962 Playboy interview with Miles Davis. He talks about the lack of people of color in movies and television and it sounds like he could be talking about 2016. This conversation goes back a long time.

And years and years before that. When you kick things off by slavery and genocide, there’s going to be a loooong undercurrent of issues that, until you get in there and really start trying to do a deep-dive and listen and address, it’s not going to go anywhere. It just shows up in other ways and reveals itself in other situations. Do you think if we hadn’t had body-cams now and people hadn’t started seeing tape of [police shootings], that they would be believed that black people were being targeted? We always believed it and knew it, because it was happening to us, but it had to be proven visually. People are like, “Oh my God.” And it’s like, “Yeah. If you’ve seen 50, know that there are 50,000.”

What kind of leverage does being in Marvel’s Avengers franchise give you when trying to get a film like this financed?

None. It gives me the leverage to dig into my pocket and spend my money on a movie, which I got to do. That’s kind of it.

What can we expect from War Machine in Captain America: Civil War? Is he OK?

God, I’d love to tell you anything more than what’s in the trailers, but then I’d have to blow this room up.

Anthony Mackie said recently he didn’t know he was an Avenger until he was at the premiere at Age of Ultron and watched the scene where Falcon, War Machine, Scarlet Witch, and Vision are welcomed in.

That’s hilarious. But he drinks a lot.

He said Marvel won’t show him the full scripts.

Again, that’s because it’s Anthony Mackie. They have to consider who they’re talking to.

So you see the full scripts.

Of course! I wouldn’t say, “Yes,” until I saw the full scripts.

When are we going to see a full-length Captain Planet movie?

Oh my God, as soon as you write it. [Laughs] That was a lot of fun. I think they actually were going to do a full-length Captain Planet movie. A real one, they were going to try to reboot that cartoon into a movie.

I would rather see the Funny or Die version.

I would rather see it that way, too.

Watch the ‘Miles Ahead’ trailer: