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" Best known for the Oscar-nominated 2002 documentary The Weather Underground, which he co-directed with Sam Green, filmmaker Bill Siegel also was a researcher on Hoop Dreams. His latest, a gut punch of a movie (in a good way), is another perceptive report from the intersection of sports and social critique: The Trials of Muhammad Ali, which is being rolled out to theaters across the country. Here&amp;#039;s Siegel in his own words about the legacy of Ali, and what it still means today. It was born more than 20 years ago. I was in my mid-20s and working on a six-hour documentary series called Muhammad Ali: The Whole Story. Well, I could tell working on that film it was going to be a boxing highlight film \u2014 with substance, but the boxing was going to be the attraction. But the fighter I was discovering and drawn to was outside the ring. It just stayed with me. If I could&amp;#039;ve gotten it done at any point in the last 20 years, I would have.  You know, the audience always completes the picture, and where the audience is you can&amp;#039;t predict, especially in documentary. At this moment I think Ali is well-known, but in a strange or incomplete way. You can go into grade school and ask third graders if they know who he is. And 95 percent will know the name. But you ask, Okay, so who is he? Name recognition is one thing, but understanding how he became Muhammad Ali, and understanding our reaction to him, is something else.  Ali comes out 10 days after the Towers went down. We&amp;#039;re all horrified, scared. That&amp;#039;s the moment: He gets out there shaking with Parkinson&amp;#039;s and says Islam means peace. I would say that&amp;#039;s a pretty heroic thing.  He&amp;#039;s not a violent man. He&amp;#039;s a boxer. And I&amp;#039;m sure there are some violent boxers, but most of them settle that shit in the ring. But at this time there was this disease, this feeling of: &amp;quot;Be who we say you&amp;#039;re supposed to be. You should be grateful for what we&amp;#039;ve given you.&amp;quot; That power struggle was revolutionary \u2014 and it was common sense. It had to happen in any just society. I think for a lot of people he inspired a lot of confidence and indignation and willingness to risk yourself for what you know inside, morally, regardless of the letter of the law. Of course he was being watched by the FBI the whole time, but he wasn&amp;#039;t doing anything illegal. They called him a draft-dodger, but he didn&amp;#039;t burn his card. He showed up at the induction ceremony and refused to step forward. For people who don&amp;#039;t know what it&amp;#039;s like to have a draft, it&amp;#039;s hard to convey all the implications of that. But I have to trust the audience. A lot of things led to the end of the draft in this country, and I think Ali must have been one of them.  I did try to show that in that period of horrific public assassinations of great leaders, Ali continued to be out in the open. He was very unguarded. To have an income after his arrest, he did these speaking gigs, and would drive himself to a lot of them, and be there with people all around him, sometimes right up on stage with him. Back then boxing was the nexus of sports and politics and culture. The heavyweight championship meant something. When Jack Johnson got it, the first black man, that was a big scary thing for a lot of white people. Now it&amp;#039;s kind of a sideshow. It&amp;#039;s so noisy now. It&amp;#039;s competing with MMA. The fact that Muhammad Ali was pretty much accepted as the world&amp;#039;s most recognizable face in 1974 is pretty amazing. Who&amp;#039;s that now? It must change every fifteen minutes. But whatever boxing has become, fame has become something else, too. It&amp;#039;s just a blizzard now. I&amp;#039;m as dumbfoundedas you to see that lo and behold, the HBO show [Stephen Frears&amp;#039;s Muhammad Ali&amp;#039;s Greatest Fight]comes out at the same time. There&amp;#039;s also a Broadway show. I can&amp;#039;t explain why things like that happen, but they do. It was weird that it happened with The Weather Underground, too. We kept thinking, &amp;quot;Somebody&amp;#039;s gotta be doing this.&amp;quot; And then our movie was out and the memoirs started coming. But with this, when I first heard about the Frears film, I was mortified. I thought, &amp;quot;Oh my God, he&amp;#039;s doing the exact same thing.&amp;quot; A great director, with a great cast. And he made the brilliant decision not to cast Ali, but to use archival footage. I haven&amp;#039;t seen it yet. I want to see it. Now I&amp;#039;m thrilled that they&amp;#039;re coming out at the same time. I hope they help each other. At a minimum, it says I was not alone in believing in this story. At times it felt lonely. As a storyteller, I&amp;#039;m driven by the question of how do you get to be who you are, or how do you become yourself? It&amp;#039;s always a struggle, and everyone does it differently. Ali&amp;#039;s journey covers the span of my life. He was in the crosshairs during some epic battles that I saw with a child&amp;#039;s eyes. I was way too young to understand what was happening, but I knew it was big. As I got older I saw Ali&amp;#039;s story as a really rare prism through which to look at ourselves. I think of that era now as kind of our national adolescence: kicking and screaming, righteous, defiant, disrespecting our elders... and sometimes being right. He really represented that in a moral, principled, and, really, a lovely way. I don&amp;#039;t think he set out to be political. I think he set out to be moral. And yeah, that means a lot, because we&amp;#039;re still finding ourselves. We&amp;#039;re still faced with some of the same challenges \u2014 of faith, of responsibility, of identity. I&amp;#039;ve not said this out loud, so if it sounds bad, sorry, but when it was done, and I finally watched it as a complete film, I realized that for me there&amp;#039;s this kind of book of life, if you look for it. There&amp;#039;s... guidance on that question of becoming yourself.  \u2014As told to Jonathan Kiefer  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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