More than just a writer and director, Michael Mann has proven himself to be a gifted psychologist, cultivating what he calls "structured schizophrenia"--working with actors to create personas unlike any audiences have seen from them before, as he did with Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans and Russell Crowe in The Insider. His latest transformation is Will Smith, who pulled no punches in altering not only his body but his entire mental state to play former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali in the hard-hitting biopic Ali.
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Long after he helped television find its cinematic potential with "Miami Vice" and "Crime Story," director Michael Mann ascended the feature ranks using stunning visuals, music and dialogue to tell stories about men struggling to live up to personal codes that inevitably lead them to sacrifice all they hold dear.
That same narrative arc--developed in films such as Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, Heat and The Insider--cut to the core of Mann's latest and riskiest project, Ali. The movie charts the political awakening of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, which led to his Muslim conversion and subsequent refusal to fight in Vietnam on religious grounds. That stance came at a great price, costing Ali, played by Will Smith, the heavyweight crown he won in the stunning knockout of the seemingly invincible Sonny Liston, and robbing him of his prizefighting career for more than three years. His embrace of the black-power and antiwar movements made him as influential in the political arena as he was in the boxing ring. Like all Mann protagonists, Muhammad Ali is as full of flaws as he is of charm--unabashedly womanizing, and abruptly rejecting spiritual adviser Malcolm X when the civil rights leader was ostracized by Elijah Muhammad, the Muslim leader who manipulated Ali for his own gain through much of his fighting career.
Perhaps Mann's greatest strength is his eye for casting seemingly unlikely actors who not only physically inhabit lead roles, but are up to the painstaking task of transforming themselves into a character. His approach has led to numerous indelible performances, perhaps the most dramatic being the transformation of Daniel Day-Lewis from art-house and My Left Foot origins to his convincingly heroic portrayal of frontier sharpshooter Hawkeye in 1992's The Last of the Mohicans. Mann took things a step further with Russell Crowe, packing pounds on the L.A. Confidential macho man and dialing down the testosterone for an Oscar-nominated performance as tobacco-company whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand in Mann's last film, The Insider. Indeed, some have murmured that Crowe's Best Actor Oscar for Gladiator was heavily influenced by his performance the year before in The Insider.
The stakes and level of actor transformation are just as high in Ali. While Smith is one of Hollywood's most bankable performers in popcorn films, he hasn't been seriously tested as an actor since an early standout performance in Six Degrees of Separation. Ali has a high budget--$105 million--and enters a holiday box-office derby that has historically shown disdain for boxing movies and biopics. The odds on Ali, the movie, might be comparable to those against Ali, the boxer, when he fought Liston or George Foreman. Of course, Ali became a legend for prevailing in both contests. Mann knows that the job he has done turning Smith into Ali will spell the difference between victory and defeat. He is predicting a knockout.
MICHAEL FLEMING: While Heat, The Insider and even Thief were based on real people, their stories were obscure enough to allow the films to sneak up on audiences. Muhammad Ali is one of the most famous living icons in the world. What made you do this?
MICHAEL MANN: There were two things. One was having the only person on the face of the earth who could possibly play Ali. Will Smith had the courage, the commitment and the conviction to launch into what he and I both knew it would take to pull this off. And that was a solid year of preparation. When you do what I do with an actor, you need people who have an extraordinary level of commitment that matches mine. We sat across the table, looked at each other and said, "Are we really going to do this?" We decided, "Yes, we will do whatever it takes to do it right." For me, the faith I had was based on knowing Will had an extraordinary and extreme commitment and intelligence. And he never wavered--ever. The other thing is, Muhammad Ali is, of course, an icon, and he is that to me personally. I'm one year younger than Ali, so the news broadcasts he was reacting violently to in his heart, that would enrage and appall him on a Tuesday night on the six o'clock news in 1967, were the exact same reactions I and millions of other people our age felt. Now, just because he's an icon, that's not a reason to make a motion picture.
Q: Well, it's almost a reason not to make one, because his story is so familiar.
A: I remember the exact moment it triggered for me. I was in London, doing press on The Insider. I found the way to tell the story, a form in which I had a possibility of bringing audiences inside the experience of being Ali. I could take that audience and internalize them into some of his experiences. That became a very dramatic motion picture.
Q: You mean the feeling of what it would be like to be in the ring?
A: I mean everything. Being in the ring, facing the monster Sonny Liston, understanding how strategic Ali's thinking is. The whole search for making himself into who he is. There's a refrain in the film, where he says, "I get to be who I want to be, not who you want me to be. I'm free to think any way I want." I wanted to show Ali as he forms who he is, and comes to the very courageous political positions he took. It's one thing to have a historical figure on the screen take a position, and show it objectively in a removed way. It's a whole other thing to feel that sinking feeling when you take that position and are denounced by everybody, the way he was in 1965. And not just by the right wing; he was denounced by [civil rights leader] Roy Wilkins, the NAACP, the New York Times, Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis. Ali is a passionate man, and there were the romances, and the way his perception was rocked stunningly by going to Ghana for the first time, being in independent Africa. He says, "Where I come from, they barely let black people drive buses, and here I am, flying on Air Ghana, flown by black African pilots." He touched everybody, and experienced everything. And there is a genius to his language. It's very comedic, very witty. His native intelligence was apparent, even in 1965, but it developed. Will and I studied his press interviews, and there was an extraordinary difference from the time he fought Liston in 1964 to when he traveled to Africa to fight George Foreman in 1974. My personal opinion is that it had to do with supporting his family by spending three and a half years going to college campuses and getting into debates with everybody. That made up for the formal education that stopped for him early. But he started boxing when he was 12.
Q: Once you find the story as a writer, what does the director in you do next?
A: Then I have to bring an actor truly into the character of Muhammad Ali from 1964 to 1974, and I can design that journey. We spent a year doing that. It's not dissimilar in a way to Daniel Day-Lewis becoming Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans. Everyone thought he was five-foot-four and shriveled up in a wheelchair from My Left Foot, but he happened to be an athlete--he was a long-distance runner. We did a very similar thing here, and spent a very long time. This is serious stuff. You do not engage in trying to do Muhammad Ali lightly. You don't mess this one up--not if you're Will Smith, not if you're Michael Mann. And if you do, you'd better be able to say that there was not one unit of energy, a quotient of intelligence, that wasn't applied to doing this, and getting Will into that character.
Q: You've thrived by making over actors like Day-Lewis and Russell Crowe. Is "makeover" the right term?
A: It is much deeper than a makeover, which is cosmetic. This is a launch into structured schizophrenia. Here, you have to build within yourself another identity. Part of your brain remembers it when you go home at night, and some of Will Smith is banging around in there, but so is someone else.
You are trying to become a different person in the way you think and the way you talk, and what you think is funny and what arouses you. Everything has got to be that total version. It is difficult to let go, but there are parts of Muhammad Ali you would like to hang on to, anyway.
Q: Whether it's Will Smith, Daniel Day-Lewis or Russell Crowe, is there a way to tell you've got an actor game for this kind of transformation?
A: I can just tell. You've got to be able to look them in the eyes and judge: Are we on the same wavelength? Or, rather, are they as crazy as I am? Is there that same passion and commitment? Does something difficult get your blood running? Al Pacino is a guy who is always willing to get up on that high wire. Some people are, and some are not. If you do what I do, you need someone to be that way. I could tell that Will was committed to going there. Will's a guy who has tremendous charisma, and when faced with something difficult, gets excited about it. And we got there. That includes [costars] Jamie Foxx, Jeffrey Wright, Jon Voight. Commitment is an honest process, and you cannot pull something like this off without it.
Q: When you take someone into this structured schizophrenia, are you like a manipulative football coach, antagonizing some, reassuring others as they're hanging out on a high wire?
A: No, it is never quite that dramatic. It is a long, structured program, one that can be a lot of fun. To truly make yourself into a boxer is not a bad thing, and Will did that. There were also Islamic studies, the nature of Ali's humor, the rhythms of his speech pattern. We worked with dialecticians. We worked with neurophysiologists to somehow find a way for Will to build within himself the reflexes of Ali, the eye-hand coordination, the hand-foot coordination. At 22, Ali had been boxing for 10 years. And if you slow down and see what he's doing, it's a blinding series of feints. A boxer always looks to
counter the opponent and takes cues as to what he'll do by the way he positions his shoulders and shifts his weight. Ali switches, and the fighter thinks he's going to lead with his left. No, he's switching again, and now he'll lead with his right. Ali confuses you so much that you don't have a counterpunch. Then you become like Liston in that first fight. Demoralized: I can't hit him, and I can't stop him hitting me, and no one told me he could hit. And so you quit after six rounds. We had to get Will to that level of speed and reflexes.
Q: When you assessed Will, what did you feel you had to work on most? Certainly he arrived with Ali-like charm and charisma.
A: I think what will surprise people about Will Smith and this motion picture is, you could describe it as acting, but it ain't acting. It is total immersion into another character. You know what he's thinking without him speaking. To reach that level, you have to become that other character. Will did it in Six Degrees of Separation, and I don't think he'd done it again until now. And he's a man now--the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is dead.
Q: What about Will most surprised you?
A: How incredibly present he could be. He would just be on, all the time, and had the kind of fast mind that great comics have. You wonder how Robin Williams can come up with what he does so quickly, and Will has that. What surprised me most was the consistency of his behavior. He and I became partners in a very stressful and highly ambitious endeavor, and you can't have a better partner in any endeavor than I had in Will Smith. No matter what it took, how hard it was, how many takes we had to go, or how exhausted we were, there was never anything other than, I'm here for you. You're here, I'm here. Whatever it took, he was there with me every single time, never wavering. There are plenty of small dramas in the shooting of a motion picture. People get irritated, they get hurt feelings, they get in bad moods. But I can't point to one moment--not one moment--that I could say that Will was not a gentleman whose commitment to this was total. And the demands on people here were extreme.
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