Michael Mann: Mann on a Mission

Q: Raging Bull's fight scenes are considered a standard against which others are measured, and Denzel Washington's brawling in The Hurricane seemed real. What was the goal for your fight scenes?

A: The goal became to feel like you're in the ring, which meant we had to bring a level of authenticity that's not been seen before. That's the level of artistic ambition we wanted in the fight scenes. We asked ourselves, "How can we do something that's never been done before? Is there a way to bring that experience to a higher level?" First, you try to understand something about boxing. It's more complex than people think. Its not about strong men who get in the ring and whoever hits the other guy hardest wins. You've got to understand how strategic and intelligent a sport it is, how psychological it is. So the place we came to was both very ambitious and simple: Become boxers. Meaning, Will should become a boxer, and everybody else should be boxers and not stuntmen. Real boxers learn to take punches, and our approach was to pull no punches, which became the mantra for every part of the film. Will hit, and took hits. [Professional boxer] James Toney knocked him down. When Joe Frazier knocks Ali down in the first fight, Will takes some big shots. I could show it to you in the editing room. There's Will's nose on the other side of his face, and his jaw's all hanging. It hurt.

Q: The movie cost $105 million, and didn't get a green light until a foreign financier helped Sony with the budget, and you and Will took responsibility for the overages. Does the artist in you bristle at these kinds of restrictions?

A: No. I want to be able to tell a financier or a studio, "Look, this is really what it's going to cost." I want that to be as accurate a number as possible because I don't want it on my conscience, I don't want my concentration affected by having to deal with the conflict of a financier thinking the budget would be one thing, and finding it's something else. I let them know, straight up, no bullshit: Here's what the movie's going to cost. If you don't want to make the movie, don't make the movie. Sometimes you guess wrong, and this was a very difficult movie to guess exactly what it was going to cost. We shot in five cities and Africa. I don't like large-budgeted motion pictures. If there's a story I'm compelled to tell that has a large budget, I might do it again, but the amount of money gets too crazy after a while. It didn't affect my process because Will and I were on the hook.

Q: Some of the hesitancy of foreign financiers seemed to be the question of whether a movie about a black figure would play in foreign territories, even with a superstar like Smith as the topliner. How did you feel about that?

A: Some people may have thought that way, but I don't, and Will didn't. Ali is a universal story about people. I don't buy into any of those parochial, provincial notions; they irritate me, to be honest. They are shortsighted. You can make a motion picture that is so esoteric that no one wants to see it except a niche audience. That's not Muhammad Ali, one of the best-known living beings on the planet. He is Coca-Cola, he is IBM, he is the Ferrari logo. I wasn't interested in making a biopic or a documentary. I wanted to show the more extreme experience of being Ali, to experience what Ali experienced. That's a ride that has universal, international, global appeal. So I get short-tempered with the argument that this is not the kind of film that historically has done well. But we'll see.

Q: The script you shot seems thematically to be a close cousin to The Insider, Heat and Thief, the idea of men made heroic by sacrificing what they truly value for honor.

A: That was my personal ambition. I like going that deep into a character and experiencing him inside out, and that was the experience of both making and seeing The Insider. It's a track that I, as a director, want to follow further. Part of the equation was to go beyond Muhammad Ali, the boxer, and find the man. His decision-making process was stunning. He didn't deduce or draw conclusions about someone, but he had instantaneous awareness and could react. Ali exhibited that genius in the ring, changing from dancing around the ring to the rope-a-dope in the Foreman fight. He also did it in other parts of life--his take on culture, the way he embraced the counteroffensive in early '60s race politics after growing up in the de facto apartheid that was midcentury Louisville, Kentucky. It's why the NAACP didn't appeal to him, which to him was like begging for a place at their lunch counter. The counteroffensive was the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, what became Black Pride. It's how he changed perception of the war in 1965, three years before other people started thinking the same way. He basically brought the conflict of that war home.

Q: You were close to him in age. Do you remember how you felt back then when he said he wouldn't fight?

A: I sure do. Along with a lot of other people, I was against this war, and I thought his statement was great, even though he was criticized by so many for being unpatriotic. Some positions he took were wrong; he was human and made mistakes. The split with Malcolm X was something he regretted. But when he said, "You want me to go 10,000 miles for you fighting against other poor people?"--that was courageous. He was tried and convicted for refusing induction, without being given due process. He was on appeal, but every state boxing commission refused to sanction him. His trainer, Angelo Dundee, says nobody's ever seen the best Muhammad Ali, and nobody ever will, because it would have occurred during those three and a half years of his prime. He sacrificed the prime of his career.

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Michael Fleming interviewed Drew Barrymore for the October

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