Don Cheadle is finally getting in the director’s seat with Kill the Trumpeter, a long-gestating biopic on jazz legend Miles Davis. The film will co-star Zoe Saldana and Ewan McGregor.
BiFrost Pictures confirmed to the Associated Press that it will produce and finance the film. Cheadle has been hoping to make this film for years, but it is finally getting off the ground and cameras will roll in June.
Kill the Trumpeter will not be your traditional birth-to-death biopic. Instead, it focuses on a period of Davis’ life when he briefly retired from music, only to come back in 1979. McGregor will play a Rolling Stone journalist, while Saldana will star as Frances Davis, Davis’ ex-wife.
When Cheadle spoke at the American Film Market, the Crash actor reiterated that this isn’t going to be just a broad overview of the Kind of Blue trumpeter’s life. “"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, reports THR. “What was going on in his mind? And how did he come out of it and return to music?”
Saldana is working on Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and is going to star in another music biopic, centering on Nina Simone. McGregor is filming Johnny Depp’s Mordecai at the moment.
As for Cheadle, he currently stars on Showtime’s House of Lies and recently appeared in Iron Man 3.
image: Photo by Bryan Steffy/Getty Images for Showtime/CBS