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Image credit: Mann and Ali: Chris Ashford/Camera Press/Retna

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Ali

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Portions of the film seem similar to the documentary ''When We Were Kings''...
Leon Gast [''Kings''' director] gave us 17 hours of outtakes from his film; he was incredibly generous. We have all this great footage of Ali sitting around the Intercontinental Hotel in Zaire with rings of journalists around him. In one scene, you see a little girl standing next to him and she takes his hand and folds up into his arm, just to be close to him. And then you see Don King see this and think this is cool and he looks around, grabs some little kid and pulls her over, and she's struggling to get away... Character was revealed.

Speaking of outtakes, what did you hate to get rid of?
The Norton fight, when Ali broke his jaw and continued to fight for seven or eight rounds, some additional scenes with Dundee (Ron Silver), and some wild, funny stuff with Howard Cosell (Jon Voight). It'll all be on the DVD, which I think will be about 30 minutes longer.

Did Ali visit you on the set?
I knew he was anticipating us shooting, but when he was actually walking around these sets, the three-dimensional reality was a little hard for him. But, you know, the man is absolutely devoid of self-pity, the world's worst candidate for clinical depression. No matter what the obstacle, he reaches down and comes back. He's a huge guy, much bigger than in pictures; he weighs about 255 now. When he rises from a chair and wobbles a little bit, if you reach out to try to help him, he'll smack your hand away. He doesn't take help; that's how Ali connects to people.

Many people will be surprised to learn that it was Ali trainer Drew ''Bundini'' Brown (Jamie Foxx) who coined the phrase ''float like a butterfly, sting like a bee'' and not Ali.
I found that relationship to be stunning. Here's this guy, he's a real shaman, he motivates himself into an extreme state of emotional being in which he sees the truth. So he communicated to Ali in phrases like ''float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,'' which is a cliché, but if you put yourself back in the time before he said it, it's an apt description of a guy who moves like Sugar Ray and hits like a heavyweight. Brown put things in these funny, poetic terms. Ali encoded his own ideas into poetry; he got that from Bundini.

Now that you've made the movie, tell the truth: Is all that grandstanding and smack talk the real Muhammad Ali?
Will and I spent a lot of time looking for footage of Ali in repose, but he never stops talking or rapping or doing something. His ideas come to him in a very fast, gestalt way: His life story is a function of the way he was in the ring, always switching strategies and coming to conclusions very quickly. The closest thing we could find [that showed an inner, private Ali] was the way he holds his hands, always protected, resting on his chest. When he points, he uses a bent finger. When he shakes hands, his hands are always limp. He protects his hands like a pianist would, and it betrays a little softness or vulnerability not usually seen.