Don Cheadle not only plays Miles Davis in the upcoming Miles Ahead movie, he directed the project himself.
For directing advice, he turned to his famous A-list friends who had become directors, he tells the April issue of United Airlines’ Rhapsody magazine.
Ben Affleck told him to listen to his gut when casting actors and hiring crew.
George Clooney’s advice was a little more like life-advice. “George was like, ‘Do your push-ups and drink a lot of water and don’t get sick,’?” Cheadle says.
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This news comes after Don Cheadle revealed he was forced to cast a white actor in order to make the movie. He said it was “one of the realities of the business that we are in” that films with all-black casts are thought to have little chance of distribution outside the United States and thus don’t attract investment.
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“There is a lot of apocryphal, not proven evidence that black films don’t sell overseas,” he told reporters at the Berlin film festival. “Having a white actor in this film turned out to actually be a financial imperative.”
Related: Don Cheadle: I Was FORCED to Hire a White Co-Star
Cheadle said it forced him to rework the script, which focuses on a period in the late 1970s in which Miles Davis fell into a creative slump.
