Why do you think it took so long for this film to come to the screen?
I think the reason is that Ali's life is so extraordinary, it's so large, and has such extreme dynamics - sacrifice, defiance, pathos, comedy - there's so much there that anybody who tried to approach it was intimidated. The question was, how do you find one piece of it that authentically does it justice? That's the difficulty, it's an extraordinary life.
These are obviously the reflections of someone who's thought long and hard about his life...
Will and I exhausted ourselves making this thing, and all we did was replicate a fraction of what Muhammad Ali did. And we didn't even do it for real, we were just making a motion picture. He looms larger to me now than he did two years ago when we first started. Not as a person, because we're very familiar with him, but the scale of what he did actually seems larger to me today than it did a couple of years ago.
What are your memories of working with Will?
As it evolved through a year spent learning 'Ali-ness', the bottom line of it was that Will would step up to the scene and everything he learned, all the training, has to be forgotten. What I'm going to ask is for him to be Ali in the moment and be totally spontaneous. So when he reacts to some injustice that's been visited upon him, he has to think of those words and thoughts, and not think of the techniques of changing his voice to sound like Ali. That's where it all has to go.
How do you feel about 'the noble art' now?
I think boxers are like actors and directors. An actor isn't intimidated by getting on stage, he can't wait to get on stage, and he'd better have his mind in the right place when he does it. The same is true of a boxer. There might be some anxiety before a fight, but if he's prepared, his feelings have to be that he can't wait to get into that ring. Boxing is something that requires a commitment of courage, but it's highly strategic and highly tactical. It really is an art.
