Don Cheadle has been attached to a Miles Davis biopic as far back as ten years ago, and now, Miles Ahead, which Cheadle stars in and directs, will soon be in theaters — April 1, 2016. Today, the first trailer for the movie premiered, and it shows just how tumultuous Davis’ live was in 1979, when he was in a sort of creative funk.
In the trailer, Davis fires off a round in his record label’s office, his recordings get stolen, he threatens to kill people… turns out that his life was pretty nuts at the time. He was a unique artist, and for Cheadle’s directorial debut, he knew he had to make a movie just as adventurous is its subject.
“When I met with [Davis’] family, I told them I wanted to do something that wasn’t like I had seen before,” Cheadle told Entertainment Weekly. “And I had a take on the movie, that if I was going to play him, that it had to be as creative and different, that if it wasn’t as aspirational as he was, then I wasn’t really that interested. And before I got to my house after that meeting, it kind of came to me that that would be hard for anyone else possibly to see it the same way that I was seeing it, so if I was going to do it, I’d probably have to direct it.”
Watch the trailer for Miles Ahead below, read the full interview with Cheadle here, and let us know in the comments if you realized just how much drama could be behind a Miles David record.
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IMAGE: Sony Pictures Classics
