Some 15 years after its release and a half year after the death of its subject, a new version of the Michael Mann film Ali is today being re-released on DVD. With a career performance by Will Smith as iconic fighter and Civil Rights era catalyst Muhammad Ali, Ali is slightly different than the version widely seen in late 2001. Mann added footage to existing scenes, and excised a ring sequence where an in-his- prime Ali dominated journeyman heavyweight opponent Cleveland Williams to keep it at a comparable length. Mann strengthening the political elements and the depiction of covert government surveillance on a fighter who challenged the status quo when he embraced the Nation of Islam, changed his “slave name” Cassius Clay and refused on religious grounds to be drafted into the army during Vietnam. The latter move got him banned from the ring and cost him his prime years. I met Mann in his Forward Pass offices. He’s made memorable movies including Heat, Collateral, The Insider, The Last of the Mohicans and others, but his office is dominated by memorabilia from Ali. Every item had a backstory. There is the photo from the airport recreated in Zaire, when it was designed one that scared pilots for whom the large red “Kinshasa” sign brought back ominous memories of a time when it was not a desirable place to land. There’s a photo of Sugar Ray Robinson embracing Ali, years after Robinson (and Joe Louis) rejected the upstart fighter. Ali, of course, was gracious.
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DEADLINE: What made you go back in and change the film, 15 years later?
MICHAEL MANN: With the hindsight of history, I felt the drama didn’t get all the way there. It wasn’t as strong as it should have been. I don’t think I changed anything on a movie like Heat [rereleased in 2015 after 20 years], but here, the proportion and how it made you feel, wasn’t quite right. I always knew how I wanted you to feel but I wasn’t sure that you were actually getting it. And then it occurred to me, what to do to make it be there.
DEADLINE: How much of this was related to Ali’s death?
MANN: Some of it. It made me think about what he meant, who he was. And, what is his story? It’s the story of defiance, a guy who says, ‘I get to be who I want to be, not who you want me to be. As the heavyweight champion of the world, I’m going to represent something, and I know it’s going to be motivational to my people, those rising up from below, all over the world.’ And so he was going to craft himself and his representation into that motivational persona. It was a very political act, an evolution that culminates for me in the [George] Foreman fight. By design or by accident, it polarized the world. The ‘60s were over. It’s 1974 in Kinshasa. The forces of the status quo were polarized around Foreman. The forces of hope, the aspirations of people rising up from below in anti-colonial struggles, poor people living in the outskirts of Mozambique, or the Congo, Ali personified that sense of aspiration. It really divided the world. It was the first world heavyweight championship fight like that in the world. It was also only televised in one house in Zaire and it was Mobutu’s.
DEADLINE: The dictator who ruled Zaire at the time.
MANN: He showed it at dinner, Idi Amin. You can’t make this stuff up. I wanted to strengthen the struggle, meaning make more tangible the adversarial forces that were adversarial, against a meaning, FBI Cointelpro, the CIA operations in the Third World, particularly countering national racial front movements. There’s a time compression. We specifically identified the man who’s killed by the firing squad as Patrice Lumumba, who in fact was killed in ’61 when Mobutu takes power. The infiltration to the Nation of Islam…all of those tracks are stronger now.
DEADLINE: What does that do to a film about a man primarily known as the greatest fighter?
MANN: When you increase the adversarial opposition to Ali, the forces of oppression, a number of things happen. One, you really get a better sense of how much he’s giving up to take the position that he takes against the war, when he loses the best years of his boxing career. And then the pressures of the forces arrayed against him, impacting and imploding into his romantic life which is tumultuous to begin with. What he stands for means so much more, and the imperative to defeat George Foreman means so much more. And the lack of faith about the outcome from Belinda is that much more poignant.
DEADLINE: She was his second wife, frustrated her husband was continually exploited by the Nation of Islam, and fearful Foreman was going to hurt him, after he had just knocked Joe Frazier around the ring like a rag doll…
MANN: It doesn’t justify what happens, but you come to understand his attraction to Veronica Porche.
DEADLINE: He met her there when she was a journalist covering the fight in Zaire, and she became the third of his four wives.
MANN: The extra scenes impact everything. I think I told a better story here.
DEADLINE: How much longer is the movie than the original film?
MANN: I don’t know that it is any longer, because I took out Ali’s fight against Cleveland Williams, which is maybe where you saw the prime that Ali lost when he was banned from boxing. I took it out because it felt like it was getting episodic.
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DEADLINE: You said that Ali told the world he wasn’t going to be the champ others wanted him to be, but then you show him becoming exactly who Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad needed him to be. He turned his back on his friend Malcolm X when he fell into disfavor with the Nation of Islam. It was a terrible moment that left Malcolm X vulnerable, and he was murdered shortly after. Between that, and the infidelities, you show a lot of moments in Ali’s life he wasn’t proud of. What was it like, confronting the actual man, at a time he was universally beloved, with those lowlights?
MANN: That was very important to him. We met about it in a meeting in Las Vegas, which was hilarious for some other reasons. It was myself, Ali and Howard Bingham.
DEADLINE: The photographer who was Ali’s constant companion, played by Jeffrey Wright.
MANN: He was Ali’s closest friend. Ali’s voice was very, very soft because of Parkinson’s. I have trouble hearing out of one ear. And Howard stutters. So, Ali would say something in a whisper I couldn’t hear. And then Howard would translate it for me with a stutter. Then I’d get it then, and I’d ask Ali a question and it started all over again. This cracked up the three of us, but one of the really important things to Ali that came through there was…because Ali had a one-time approval of the script…and he said the thing that was really important to him was he didn’t want hagiography. He didn’t want idolatry or any kind of sugarcoating. Imagine the amount of flattery that he received through the years. I understood that but I also wanted to know why. He said something really profound: that he was proud of the mistakes he made. He thought he had recognized not all of them but some of them and that he’d fixed some of them and had come to peace with them. And he just walked through life with a sense of, I am who I am and you’re diminishing me if you sugarcoat or fictionalize it. I asked him, ‘What was the one that you regret the most?’ And it was Malcolm X, not having healed the fissure between the two of them that he created when he rejected Malcolm. He loved Malcolm. When we were shooting in Miami, I had working with us Attallah Shabazz, Malcolm’s daughter. She looked very much like Malcolm, the light complexion, the reddish hair. Ali had never met her, and I introduced the two of them. He told her how much he loved her father and how much regret he had that he had never had a chance to make it right with him.
DEADLINE: With the Nation of Islam, it sure comes off like he was pretty well…
MANN: Indoctrinated?
DEADLINE: Manipulated. And when he was banned from boxing, the Nation of Islam rejected him, only to come back when he was fighting again. How did he feel about that?
MANN: At the end of the day he embraced Sunni Islam. It’s portrayed accurately in the film, as Belinda says, “They’re around you when you got it and they fall off you when you don’t.” She was the daughter of a very important figure in the Nation of Islam.
DEADLINE: Ang Lee wants to make Thrilla In Manila, a film about the Ali-Frazier fight, shot in 120 frames a minute with 40K resolution and 3D so you can feel what it was like to be Ali in that ring taking devastating punches from Frazier. That seems very much the vantage point of Ali, where the audience feels all this tumultuous stuff coming at him, and Ali reacting. That includes devastating punches from Sonny Liston, Frazier and Foreman.
MANN: Oh, yeah. I wanted you to feel like you were in the ring, mixing it up. I wanted it to be the best boxing and to feel authentic. What is to be Ali, to listen to the echoes in that ring? We did a couple of things to get there and one of the main things was working with Will Smith. Nobody could have had an actor as courageous and dedicated as he was, as we both were, probably out of fear.
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DEADLINE: Why fear?
MANN: Because of the audacity of thinking we could…for Will to think, OK, I’m going to become Muhammad Ali, one of the most iconic people in the 20th century. And for my part, it was trying to get this right, and have you see the world through Ali’s eyes and walk in his shoes and be inside of his skin. Early on when we were working together, there was the physical challenge: how do you become Muhammad Ali? If you’re Will Smith, you dedicate a good chunk of time. In terms of the boxing, we came to the conclusion fairly early on, you’re just going to have to become a boxer. Boxers take punches. Become a boxer, take a punch and that’s what we did. We…
