he
year is 1974 and in a smoke-filled hotel room jammed with sportswriters,
the up-and-coming boxing promoter Don King is about to announce the Rumble
in the Jungle heavyweight championship bout between Muhammad Ali and
George Foreman in Zaire.A surly Foreman sits beside him and, as King launches into his now familiar verbose tirade, there is a ruckus at the back of the room. Pushing through the crowd is a 32-year-old Muhammad Ali,
A publicist points me out to him and he breaks off to come over to shake hands and confirm our appointment for later. "I been telling you for years how good I am and now you gonna find out," he says. "I always told you I was the greatest." It is pure Ali braggadocio. Then Will Smith winks and continues on his way through the room.
For 14 months, 32-year-old Smith has devoted himself to preparing for his role as the former heavyweight champion in writer-director Michael Mann's film biography Ali, working on assimilating not just Ali's style and speech patterns, but his whole personality.
He claims to have read everything ever written about the man, studied every clip of film, talked with Ali himself for hours on end and taken classes in Islamic studies at the University of California. He even worked with a neuro-physiologist to learn the reflexes a young Ali would have had.
Now that production is under way and the cameras are finally rolling, it is obvious to everyone on the set just how well Smith's diligent homework has paid off: the transformation is amazing.
Bulked up to Ali's early fighting weight of 215 pounds, Smith has learned to fight like a professional boxer and talks and moves like Ali. With the help of a hairpiece and a prosthetic nose, he even looks just like the young Ali.
"Will is the only person on the planet who could do this," says Mann. "He has become Ali. I'm looking through the camera lens and I'm transported. It's spooky."
Ali is a massive gamble because of the cost of recreating the era, the expensive fight scenes and the fact that film biographies have always been questionable propositions that are by no means certain to attract the ticket-buying public.
The idea of Ali was first brought to Sony's Columbia Pictures nine years ago by producer Jon Peters. The studio gave it the green light, with director Barry Sonnenfeld in charge and Will Smith as Ali. But Michael Mann replaced Sonnenfeld last February. He promptly hired Eric Roth, his co-writer on his previous film The Insider to rewrite the script, and began scouting locations in Africa.
It was only after extensive meetings during which Mann, Smith and Peters all agreed to take substantial cuts in their upfront fees and Mann dispensed with some expensive locations that the studio gave the go-ahead to resume work
on the project. "We were going to get the movie made one way or another - we're very committed," said Mann with a laugh. "You're looking at guys who have put some material stuff where their mouth is."
The film is being made with the total co-operation of Ali, who turned over tapes, books, newspaper clippings and his memories to Smith and Mann. All insist that the film will not skate over touchy topics but will portray Ali as he really was, faults and all.
It deals with the period between 1964 - when he won the world heavyweight title by beating Sonny Liston - and 1974, when he regained it from George Foreman. During that time, he also had three wives, several girlfriends, embraced the religion of the Nation of Islam and was stripped of his title because he refused to go to Vietnam.
"He confronted some of the most profound historical conflicts of the era and, at the same time, was devoted to women, convertibles and rock and roll, and was heavyweight champion of the world too," says Mann, who was nominated for an Oscar for directing The Insider, which was also based on a true story.
Ali and his wife, Lonnie, are regular visitors to the set, where he loves to exchange banter with Smith, who stays in character as Ali even when the cameras have stopped rolling.
Smith likes to tell how Ali watched as, portraying him at age 22, before he won the world title from Sonny Liston, Smith went through his Ali routine, skipping rope, dancing, shouting and chattering his "I am the greatest" babble.
Entranced, Ali watched Smith go through his paces in the Miami gym. Then he turned and whispered to his longtime friend and photographer Howard Bingham:
"Man, why didn't you tell me I was that crazy?"
Smith tells him, Ali-like: "Sit down. You come to watch me now. You know I'm the greatest thing that ever happened to acting." Ali grins broadly.
"There's this look in his eye, as if he is watching himself," says Smith later. "How weird must that be? Watching somebody play yourself. He's just so in love with the project and that's my fuel - to see that look in his eyes. For me, it's the role of a lifetime."
The first time they met, Smith was hitting the speed bag when Ali came into the gym. "He came up to me and said, 'Man, people tell me that you almost as pretty as me,'" recalls Smith." I said, 'That's funny, 'cos the same people tell me I'm prettier than you ever was.'"
Ali was so tickled that when his daughters came to join him he implored the actor, "Will, Will, do that thing that you do."
"What do you mean, that thing that I do?" said Smith. "That thing is you.
"The weird thing about playing him is that he actually is a performer. His eyes light up when he gets a crowd of people he can perform for. He's like a boxer, even in the way he speaks and tells jokes.
"He jabs with a joke, then smiles and stands back and then hits you with a flurry of jokes. Then he lays back for a minute and lets you respond. He looks at an audience the way a fighter does except it's not about taking you down, it's more about bringing you in and making you feel his warmth. We've spent a lot of time together and we have the same points of view on a lot of things. We don't disagree too much."
Upstairs in a hotel suite Smith explains: "Improvisation is all part of Ali's dialogue. We have a vast array of Ali-isms that we piece together as we go. I spent six months studying everything about Muhammad Ali - his voice, mannerisms, rhythms - before I even opened page one of the script."
During our conversation, Smith occasionally adopts his Ali persona to illustrate a point, but he reverts to himself to say seriously: "I want Muhammad to really love this movie. If he doesn't, then the last two years' work has all been pointless."
For the fight scenes, no stuntmen or stand-ins were used. Instead, Smith mixed it up with professional boxers such as former world champion James Toney, who plays Joe Frazier, and the British-born former WBO heavyweight champion Michael Bent, as Sonny Liston.
To get in fighting trim, Smith worked with trainer Darrell Foster, who told him:
"I'm gonna teach you how to fight for real."
He did. The result, says Smith, is the most realistic fight scenes ever filmed. "We didn't want to fake anything," he says. "We really hit each other. People were getting punched in the face for real. I got hit by James Toney so hard he knocked me down. I can't imagine what else we could have possibly done to make the fight scenes any better.
"It's the most amazing boxing footage that has ever been committed to film and it's going to really shock people. They are going to ask, 'How did they get that shot to look so real?' And the answer is that it IS real."
The cast and crew will soon move to Mozambique, where they will spend five weeks filming the famous Rumble in the Jungle. But, even when filming is over and Smith has moved on to other things, he intends to continue with his fighter's workout, sparring and training in three-minute rounds for three hours every day.
He looks as fit as any professional fighter and admits: "I love fighting. The confidence it gives you is incredible. As we sit here, I know I could kick your ass - and I feel very confident about that." He laughs. "When you walk around with that attitude, it makes you feel that much more comfortable and that much more relaxed."
He flexes his muscles and briefly becomes Ali again.
"Man, I'm in great shape. I'm so pretty."
- Rebecca Carnforth