On the day before his new film, Miles Ahead, was about to be screened at SXSW, actor Don Cheadle sat down for an enlightening conversation about the film and his career. The discussion went far longer than scheduled, but no one seemed to mind as Cheadle spoke about getting started in Hollywood and how, even at this point of his career, he can still get nervous about finding “the next job.”
New York magazine chief film critic David Edelstein asked a series f thoughtful questions, taking Cheadle from his first major film role in The Devil In A Blue Dress with Denzel Washington to his philanthropic causes after making Hotel Rwanda to making Miles Ahead. Early in his career, Cheadle said he always wanted to work, much to the chagrin of his agent who begged him to stay in Hollywood for pilot season.
“You don’t get to be in the moment and also be out of the moment and kind of third eye yourself,” as an actor, Cheadle noted after telling a story about Laurence Olivier being disappointed that he couldn’t see his own Richard III. “You either get to do it and come out of it and hope that it works or you’re kind of always standing on the sidelines of your performance.”
“You’re trying to stay in it as much as you can,” he later said. “It’s fleeting… It’s not until really recently that I talked about my ‘career’ using that word. It’s always just felt like job to job to job. Because every time that we wrap a movie or wrap a TV show, I become unemployed. Like, that’s it. So unless you get the next thing going, you’re like, ‘Is it going to get going again?’”
After a long detour through Boogie Nights, Edelstein brought Cheadle to Hotel Rwanda, a film that earned Cheadle his only Oscar nomination so far. Cheadle admitted that he had never really known about the situation in Rwanda before doing research for the film. But once he learned what was going on there, he became committed. He later did a tour of Rwanda with a Congressional delegation, a crew from Nightline and the African Union.
“It just put me in the jetstream of people who had been working on the issue before, prior to my getting there,” Cheadle said. “I just got swept up into the activism that had predated me. It did become something that is very important to me.”
When it came to Miles Ahead, Cheadle agreed that he didn’t want to do a film about Miles Davis that went from “birth to grave,” as Edelstein said. Instead, the film focuses on a very particular point in the jazz legend’s life, after he had stepped away from music for five years. His past is only seen in flashbacks.
Cheadle said that he never really intended on making a film about Davis anyway after doing other biopics. But when Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, Davis’ nephew Vince Wilburn said that Cheadle was making a biopic. The only problem was that Cheadle didn’t know he was!
Davis’ family pitched Cheadle ideas, but none of them really interested him until he approached them with his own idea. Initially, Cheadle hoped to find a director to work with, but eventually he realized that he would just have to direct it himself.
Miles Ahead hits theaters on April 1.
Source: http://thecelebritycafe.com
