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Ali
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3
Q:
There has been cheating though hasn't there?
Mann: Of course. I'm not saying there's not corruption in boxing. Particularly,
the area where Ali developed in boxing was taken over by a couple of guys
from Chicago and suddenly there were Friday night fights. I remember being
a kid in Chicago watching the Friday night fights with my dad and all
the bookmakers had inside odds and, of course, there was plenty of corruption
in boxing. At the same time there was something about boxing. Why did
Norman Mailer write 'The Fight', which was one of his best books about
boxing. There is some wonderful cultural history in the sixties tracking
primarily Muhammad Ali's relevance to the sixties. Why did people see
it? Because it is also as corrupt as you could be on one side of the spectrum,
it also elevates itself sometimes to become almost mythic. Clearly, the
Rumble in the Jungle, which is where we elected to end this film, was
exactly one of those kind of fights where, as someone had described, Ali
came to signify some kind of aspiration to a lot of people all over the
planet, kind of rising up through the sixties. He signified something
positive to all of those people. And George Foreman came to signify something
else, he came to signify a kind of indifferent, anonymous, disinterested
power and the Frazier fight, which the film doesn't deal with that much,
was absolutely an analogue of a pro-life America. There was a documentary
called Nation Divisible and basically the establishment was rooting for
Joe Frazier and everybody else was rooting for Muhammad Ali.
Q: Did any of Ali's
mannerisms stay with you after the shoot?
Smith: Yes, the pure appreciation of beautiful women. That has stayed
with me. The momentos, I kept everything. All of the clothes, all of the
gloves, everything I could sneak into my trailer. I knew from day one
that this would be a journey that I would remember for the rest of my
life. When we got into Africa we had the opportunity to sit with Nelson
Mandela and at every turn in making this film I just had new experiences
and was being enlightened. I was keeping everything that I could get my
hands on.
Q: What about Ali's
vocal mannerisms.
Smith: We worked with a dialect coach. We approached it first in the same
course syllabus that Michael Mann laid out just after the physical. We
found that Ali had a big, wide open chest and that's what gave him a big
resonant voice, but he also really constricted his throat which gave him
almost a higher pitched sound and then we traced essentially the flavour
of his dialect to seven Baptist preachers. So we studied a few Baptist
preachers. You know how he'll get really low and speak really low and
getting really dramatic, and then he takes it up high so it's really that
very holy Baptist preacher trying to impart the holy ghost.
Mann: It was so facile that we would analyse an interview he did in 1965.
Someone just stops him on the way into a Rooster in Holiday Inn and asks
him if he has a prediction and Ali would say in five lines that he didn't
have a prediction, but he pronounced the word prediction three times in
a different way. And we were working on it and realised he's playing three
different characters in one simple paragraph.
Smith: The guy says 'well champ, do you have a prediction for the fight'
and he says 'well, I don't have no perdiction' and then he says 'I will
not tell you the pudiction because if I tell you, you might not come!'
'But I can predict that it will be a shocking and a dreadful night'
Q: I know the film
deals with the history very fairly and honestly, but I wonder if there
has been any negative reaction from people portrayed in it?
Mann: Not so far. We have had a lot of contact with everybody in it. Malcolm
X's daughter saw the film last week and liked the film very, very much.
Q: What chance
has Mike Tyson got against Lennox Lewis?
Smith: That's a tough one. That's real tough. If Mike trains, he's hard
to beat. But I think Lennox Lewis is a heavy enough puncher and a cautious
enough fighter to potentially beat Mike cause he's jab, jab, jab, right
hand and will tire him out. I think if he gets past the third round he
will be a really great champ.
** ENDS **