Production is officially underway in Paris on Miles & Juliette, the new feature from Oscar-nominated director Bill Pohlad and his River Road Entertainment banner. Damson Idris stars as Miles Davis, with Anamaria Vartolomei playing Juliette Gréco opposite him. Seven new names round out the cast: J. Alphonse Nicholson as Kenny “Klook” Clarke, Jay Reeves as Tadd Dameron, Grammy winner Terrace Martin as Charlie “Bird” Parker, Denny Love as James Moody, Lodric D. Collins as Max Roach, and Hubert Point-Du Jour as John Coltrane.
Rather than tracing Davis’s later, more widely documented career, the film narrows in on a single transformative chapter: his first trip outside the United States, a 1949 visit to Paris at just 22 years old that placed him in the orbit of Gréco, the singer and actress then becoming a defining face of the postwar Left Bank. Pulitzer Prize finalist Zora Howard wrote the script, framing the film around that fleeting but formative relationship rather than a sweeping career retrospective. Pohlad described the project as something he’d long been drawn to, calling the pairing of two young artists discovering each other against the backdrop of a changing city and musical era “deeply cinematic.”
What makes this particular telling notable is where it chooses to focus: not Davis the icon, but Davis the 22-year-old abroad for the first time, still becoming himself. That angle, paired with direct involvement from the Davis estate through executive producers Darryl Porter, Erin Davis, Cheryl Davis, and Vincent Wilburn Jr., suggests a story more interested in interiority than myth-making. The surrounding cast reinforces that intent, several actors and musicians stepping into roles modeled on real figures from Davis’s own circle, with Martin, a Grammy-winning artist in his own right, taking on Charlie Parker.
Pohlad previously tackled a similarly formative approach to musical biography with Love & Mercy, his Brian Wilson film starring Paul Dano, John Cusack, Elizabeth Banks, and Paul Giamatti. He produces Miles & Juliette alongside Andrew Van Wyk, Kim Roth, and Dan Clifton for River Road, with Mick Jagger and Victoria Pearman producing through Jagged Films, and Pascal Caucheteux’s Why Not Productions handling French production services. Behind the camera, the team includes cinematographer Maryse Alberti, production designer Dan Weil, editor Sabine Hoffman, and composer Robert Glasper, who previously produced the 2016 Davis tribute album Everything’s Beautiful and has long cited Davis as a foundational influence on his own work. CAA Media Finance holds North American rights.
With filming now in motion and a script built around a lesser-explored chapter of Davis’s life, the real test ahead is whether the film can capture the specific, unglamorous texture of an artist still becoming who he’d eventually be, rather than leaning on the legend audiences already know.