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Don Cheadle? A Traitor?
December 29, 2008

As the star and producer of the current thriller Traitor (Anchor Bay, available now), Don Cheadle has plenty of stories to tell about the making of film. He’s been on a slew of talk shows and done a zillion interviews for print outlets and film websites (including this one), talking about how he and his partners got the script out of turnaround at Disney, how they made it with such a relatively low budget ($25 million) and how the “confines” of that low budget still managed to get them around the world (it was shot in five different countries). Cheadle’s will also admit, though, that he didn’t much enjoy talking about the film on the commentary track.

 

“I don’t even like seeing me in a movie once I’ve finished it, let alone doing the commentary,” Cheadle told me in a phone interview last week. [Co-writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff] and I just went through the movie and

talked as we watched it. I’m trying to get out of my own way and just look at it as a piece of storytelling.”

 

And compelling storytelling it is. Concerning a devout American Muslim (Cheadle) who also happens to be a former Special Forces explosives expert who may be involved in a series of terrorist bombings, Traitor offers as even-keeled a look at the duality of man as seen in both extremists and law enforcers as we’re ever likely to see.

 

“It didn’t try to paint the situation as one side being all good and one side being all bad,” said Cheadle. “When you’re up against it, people don’t always default to their best nature to put it together.”

 

Traitor is a project of Cheadle’s own Crescendo Productions, which right now has only a pair of credits to its name: this film and the 2007 documentary Darfur Now. Cheadle’s long-in-development Miles Davis bio-pic (in which he will star, produce and most likely direct) is an upcoming Crescendo project, but there’s still no start date for it on the calendar (“We’re still working on the script--we wanna get it just right,” he told me.) Cheadle admits that good projects are hard to find and that he has no specific agenda in mind when it comes to what kind of productions Crescendo will pursue.

 

“Our mandate is good, interesting films that excite us,” he said. “Or it could be something special and small. I just like good stories, however they manifest themselves.”

Posted by Laurence Lerman on December 29, 2008 | Comments (1)