Crowd-sourced movies are a dime a dozen nowadays, and a glance at the pitches made by many of the filmmakers is that their film is a personal passion project. They all say it in different ways, but when Don Cheadle says it we know it to be true. For years (at least since '08) he's been developing a film on jazz icon Miles Davis, and with only three days left for the Indiegogo campaign to hit its $325K goal, Cheadle is pulling out all of the stops to drum up some more coin.
The first image from Miles Ahead features Cheadle as the flashy jazz superstar, and boy is it a striking shot. He even got the jheri curl exactly right. But it's appropriate for a film that promises to be anything but your typical biopic. Instead it centers on Davis as he and a Rolling Stone journalist plan a heist to steal back some recordings meant to reignite his career. Ewan McGregor and Keith Stanfield co-star, and Cheadle tells EW this project is purely his own and totally without studio input...
Cheadle: "This is an independently produced film. There is no studio element. We’re still in the process locking down all the financing so it was a component of funds needed to cover a gap , including my own personal money I’ve put into the movie and a consortium of others. It’s to cover what it takes to put together a period movie, that has to have different looks and ways you’re trying to authenticate the time period you’re dealing with. And the music rights—all of that stuff costs money. But it also felt like a good way to open him up back to the public and try to raise that awareness and use the social mediums to make this a social event. To make it social, like the music Miles talked about. It just made sense on multiple levels to do it this way."
So if you can, pitch a few coins Cheadle's way so Miles Ahead can begin production later this summer.
