After being announced more than seven years ago, Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis biopic will finally make it to cinemas.
Kill the Trumpet Player will be Cheadle’s directorial debut and he will also star in the film as the famous jazz musician. BiFrost films announced this week that it will be financing and producing the film, reports the Washington Post.
BiFrost principal Daniel Wagner has already given Cheadle praise for the project saying that Davis is “the role [Cheadle] was born to play.”
Cheadle, known for his role as James “Rhodey” Rhodes in the second and third installments of Marvel’s Iron Man series, co-wrote Kill the Trumpet Player with Steven Baigelman.
The film will not follow the blueprints of a typical biopic and detail Davis’s entire life and career. Instead, it will focus on only a short period of Davis’s life, when the musician retired from music and re-emerged onto the music scene in 1979.
Cheadle himself talked about his film’s unique take on Davis’s life at this year’s American Film Market, saying that he wanted to “kill the term” biopic.
"For us as creative people, the time of his life that was most interesting was the five years when he wasn't playing, when he was silent,” he said. “What was going on in his mind? And how did he come out of it and return to music?"
It was recently announced that Ewan McGregor (Star Wars: Episode I) and Zoe Saldana (Star Trek: Into Darkness) have both joined the production and will co-star along with Cheadle.
McGregor will be playing the Rolling Stone writer who helped Davis steal his music back after he ended his retirement. Zaldana will be playing Davis’s former wife Frances Davis.
Filming for Kill the Trumpet Player will begin in June.
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