When the film won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary, George Foreman and Muhammad Ali came to the stage with the filmmakers to show they had made peace. Foreman helped Ali, stricken with Parkinson's Disease, climb the steps to the stage.
Almost all of the footage was shot in 1974. The film took 23 years to complete because the negatives and rights were caught up in civil suits involving the Liberians who financed it.
In a 1997 interview on Charlie Rose (1991), Leon Gast spoke about what made Muhammad Ali different in his eyes: "During the filming of it, he was the most generous, accessible human being I ever worked with. On other projects I've worked on, I worked with some icons in the past, and usually the closer I got to them, the more that icon would begin to tarnish and disintegrate. But with Ali it was directly the opposite. The closer I got to him and the real story of Ali... He just became this individual who I think one day will be probably remembered as much for his action outside the ring as inside the ring."
This film is part of the Criterion Collection, spine #998.