Don Cheadle thanked fans this week after raising more than $325,000 for his project on the life and work of Miles Davis. The film is called "Miles Ahead" and has been in the works for years, but it finally got the financial support it needed thanks to this successful round of crowdsourcing on Indiegogo. Cheadle will direct the project and also star in it as Davis.

In an interview with Shadow and Act last month, Cheadle described how he came up with the idea:

The project first had traction in 2008 when Miles was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and his nephew told reporters that I was going to be playing him in the movie, which was the first I’d heard of it. People started calling to try and put the movie together because the family had given their blessing for me to be in it. I started working with writers and at that point it became clear that the take on the story that I wanted to do was going to have to be controlled by me. I couldn’t really translate it to someone else and have it come off in the way that I wanted and needed it to.

So we had a script very early that we went out with, and a lot of people bid on it and several studios had optioned it. And then the world collapsed – the financial crisis hit and a lot of those mini-majors went out of business. We were kind of left without a home at that point, which turned out to be, for us, a good period of time because we pulled the movie back and restructured it and brought on Steven Baigelman ("Get On Up", "Feeling Minnesota") who I co-wrote the movie with, and created a different story.

At that point we went out again with it, and again had a lot of bites and a lot of places that were trying to put it together. And we just finally settled on making it with the financier that we have now, and are again in earnest targeting a start date and casting it, and now we’re four weeks out.

Read more at Shadow and Act.