As editor on Leon Gast's When We Were Kings, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte took it upon himself to resurrect the footage of the concert that was supposed to coincide with "The Rumble in the Jungle." Soul Power is his vérité concert doc starring some of the legendary musicians of R&B.

By Brandon Harris

Twenty-two years in the making, When We Were Kings, Leon Gast's absorbing chronicle of the famed 1974 heavyweight title fight between an aging Muhammad Ali and a young, strapping George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, only told part of the story of that legendary moment. The event it depicted — not only the fight itself but also its lead up and aftermath — was unlike any other in the history of sports. It was one of Don King's first professional bouts, and the notorious boxing promoter didn't have the $5 million he promised both Ali and Foreman. In the days before HBO and Pay-Per-View, there were no assurances it could be raised in a traditional way, so King had to find another, more lucrative way to package the event.

As Gast's fascinating Oscar winner shows, King moved the fight to Zaire, where the flamboyant president Mobutu Sese Seko was happy to host and co-sponsor the event, and, after securing a consortium of international investors, he dubbed the fight the "Rumble in the Jungle." A race-baiting nationalist (at least when it suited him), King played up the Pan-African elements of the endeavor — two of black America's most revered figures going toe-to-toe in a far-flung sub-Saharan African nation and a host of the leading lights of African-American and continental music scheduled to perform in a concert the weekend of the fight. The fight was postponed due to a hand injury suffered by Foreman during training, but the concert, which was already in motion, could not be delayed.

Known in posterity as Zaire '74, the concert is the subject of the new documentary, Soul Power. Directed by the noted independent film producer (High Art, Thirteen), IFP Board Chairman, and When We Were Kings editor Jeffery Levy-Hinte, Soul Power repurposes cutting-room floor footage from Kings to fashion a document of that amazing musical event's planning, execution and triumph. Featuring performances by James Brown, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz and B.B. King among many others, it is an intoxicating glimpse at a peculiar and stirring cultural moment, one whose relevance has not faded with time. Sony Pictures Classics opens the film July 10.

How did your process working on When We Were Kings lead to the conceiving and ultimately making of Soul Power? Well I would like to think that I was hired to work as an editor on When We Were Kings because I was the most qualified, impressive person for the job. But in fact I think I was the low bidder, so Leon [Gast] and David Sonenberg ended up bringing me on, which was great for me — I was young at the time and willing to work for cheap, to put the hours in that were necessary, and kind of naive enough to not ask too many questions going into it. And then, as far as the conceiving of this film, it sort of took place in stages. I mean, in editing When We Were Kings, I was very aware that this material was wonderful, and it was tragic that it was being sent back into the vault. But I can't say that the specific character of [Soul Power] — of what the film became — was conceived until I started working on it, which was in 2006.

When you went back into the footage it had been nearly 10 years since completing When We Were Kings. How did your perception of it change in that gap? When we were making Kings, we looked at the footage in a very specific way: How we can tell the story of the fight in the most effective way? For the concert elements, Leon actually had a pretty clear idea. You know, "Okay, this song," or, "This type of sequence." There wasn't much deep exploration. There was kind of the random looking through and taking note of very cool things as I was going through the three-quarter-inch tapes, but it wasn't thorough.

You weren't using nonlinear editing systems when you cut When We Were Kings, were you? We actually used a very early Avid. But, it had 12 gigabytes of memory so you could only digitize what you were going to use, and there was a lot of swapping out of media. It's not like now, where literally we have every frame and every second of audio online, completely accessible for whatever we want to do with it. The first thing I did with Soul Power is retransfer all the footage, retransfer all the sound, synchronize everything, and then watch everything. I can't say my perception changed so much — it was just a completely different experience, a completely different approach, because it was sort of systematic and thorough. And also I was looking at it for a different reason — the purpose had changed. I'm a big believer that the footage itself — how one perceives it or understands it or even what it means — is very dependent on what questions you're asking. There's no kind of neutral or objective or dispassionate way to approach it. You have an agenda when you come to it, and that then dictates what you actually take from it. I think it's important for filmmakers to really form that clear agenda, that clear sense of purpose — that's the only way to proceed. I think if you don't have that you're just deluding yourself or you're not admitting what your agenda is.

It seems that your agenda in large part was to show this sort of fleeting moment of a Pan-African embrace between African-American and African musical artists. But 10 different filmmakers may have had 10 different agendas with this same footage. They could've each drawn out a completely different film. Absolutely. I mean, I tried to make the film that exactly portrayed the concert with a kind of vitality and strength, and the superlative character of the musical performances, and then I wanted to find a way to disclose and portray what I interpreted to be the thoughts and feelings of the people who were there, and the importance of the Pan-African and going-back-to-the-roots element. Again, that's my interpretation. And I think the people that were there for the most part would agree [with it], but I can't say that it was the only interpretation. And then I think at the third level there was sort of this aesthetic issue of really wanting to make a film that evoked films of that time, so it's vérité, it's within the moment, it doesn't have any retrospective elements nor a kind of narrator or some element which sort of stands above the film and judges it. I think it's always a charade when one does that.

Did you come to this project with a particular interest in this era's music as well as in the politics of blackness that much of that music hinges upon? And how did your opinions about these elements change as the project evolved? I loved the music — I was born in '67, so I grew up in the '70s and it was actually the music of my childhood, in a way. But I can't say that I'm one of these fans who has every recording that James Brown ever made. As far as the politics of the day, you know, I'm very fascinated by alternative and subversive political groupings and movements. I studied them pretty extensively in various forms; I was at graduate school in political science, but again, I'm not an expert — more of a well-informed dilettante when it comes to those sorts of politics. But feeling that that history is something one rarely gets to see portrayed through the voice of the people who were making that history — I really saw that as a great opportunity, to put that out there.

As you were constructing the film, I'm sure that you had to leave stuff out that you probably in your heart of hearts would have wanted to keep in. And I'm sure you tested the film on audiences unfamiliar with the material. How did audiences respond to being immersed in this vérité, reportage style of portraying the concert and its buildup, without any retrospective interviews and very few title cards? I think it's a very effective style, but I kept thinking that perhaps if I were not familiar with the concert and the circumstances surrounding it, that I might not have gotten as much out of it. Did you encounter that with people? Oh yeah, definitely. The end result I think is somewhat of an armistice, you know, [laughs] — to reconcile the different tendencies. I think for the first cut there was a majority of people who loved the vérité, wanted more concert [footage], and who didn't want more context. We had a lot more backstory about the process of putting on the concert, and people weren't into that. But there was a strong and vocal minority that was like, you know, "What's going on? We don't understand. You're not telling us what's happening." And I tried through a series of test screenings to find a way to stay within the vérité modality but to try to answer as many of those concerns as I could. Believe it or not, it was a big leap to get to the title cards at the beginning of the film, even though they're very small. Like, "Okay, I will spell out this element of it." And then I cut in a way that tried to establish greater clarity around what they were doing, what was the nature of the music festival, who was involved, what was — in kind of a synoptic way — the structure that allowed the music festival to take place. I personally feel that it's the right balance. Would I have liked some footage that made certain things clearer? Probably. But I'm also a big fan of ambiguity and immersion and enjoying the process of coming to an understanding as to what's transpiring. But that's me personally, as a film viewer. Any film is going to have competing senses of what the priorities should be, and I'm actually pretty happy, and surprised, to be honest, at how well people have accepted the vérité approach.

And how did working as a director allow you to see that process in a different way or approach it in a different manner than you do as a producer who often works with auteurist directors? Well it's funny because if somebody else was directing it, I probably would've pulled the same impulses. There would have been a discussion and the director would ultimately have done whatever the director felt was right. And that's also the way I produce. I'm very engaged but ultimately very deferential, because it's the director's job to have that vision. So I found [this process] tremendously pleasurable, and in a way relatively easy because I didn't have to have those discussions. I just was like, "Okay, this is the way I think we need to do it, and let's do it this way." The editor, David [A. Smith], he was wonderful — he had his own views, but we were really in great agreement over the basics, so it's not like we had any conflict. It was a very funny thing, to be honest. I can see why directors become such megalomaniacal and egotistical people — until you get out into the real world again, and then you realize you're just small, insignificant, destined for heartbreak and, most likely, future failure. But while it lasts it's very nice.

So does that mean you're not anticipating directing another project? I would love to, if the stars align. It's just such a specific and special thing of how [Soul Power] came together. I have a couple more feature docs, one of which is actually shot, so I will do that. It's much more of an art piece. It's about wooden boat builders in Martha's Vineyard. I shot it over the last several years but I just haven't had time to finish it. And I have some other sense of things that might be commercially more interesting, but I have a really poor sense of commerciality. My mind doesn't work that way, I think to my detriment. We'll see how it turns out in the end. And then I can imagine doing features as well, which I love to produce and to be involved in making, but it's such a really difficult and painful world, you know? [laughs] I don't know if I really want to engage with it at that level.

You admit that thinking about how things are going to play in the marketplace is not your specialty, but do you feel like that's increasingly something that you're having to do from the very conception of a project now? Absolutely. I mean, I certainly do think about it, I'm just not particularly good at it. That's more what I wanted to get at. I'm the genius that brought the world The Hawk Is Dying, which I thought was a brilliant film and going to be very successful in its space. And I still love the film, I'm very happy I made it, but, you know, we lost the investors all their money, which I've done on more than one occasion. So, yeah, you always have those considerations. I think where they manifest themselves in Soul Power is, I knew I wanted to make a film that — and this is a very banal way to say it — but I just wanted to make a film that I felt people would find entertaining and engaging and dynamic. It moved, it had to be 90 minutes, but really that is just a commercial issue. I didn't feel compromised, but I probably would've made a longer movie if I wasn't thinking in that way. If I was thinking with a smaller, much more niche audience, people who love Frederick Wiseman or Maysles or any of the other greats, I probably would've made a two-and-a-half-hour movie, and it would've been fine and great, but it would not be distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.

How have some of the recent changes in the marketplace weighed on the type of scripts you're willing to produce or develop at this point? Well I actually put a moratorium on new projects about two-and-a-half years ago because of the difficulties of getting them financed. Frankly the script is essential to the whole process, but it's really the entire quote-unquote package of the director and the actors. I just wanted to concentrate on the projects I had on my plate, and to kind of step out of this whole development cycle, which is expensive and very time-consuming and hadn't been terribly successful for me. So part of what I've done in the last two years are four or five documentaries. [With documentaries] you're looking at more of a treatment or a pitch as opposed to a script. Now, I think unless you can make the film for a half a million dollars or less — or if somebody's just willing to write the check and not really be overly cognizant of, or overly concerned with, the quality of that investment — it's pretty difficult to make any of these independent films unless you have the type of script and package that's interesting to Focus or Fox Searchlight. Or River Road or Big Beach, the major kind of producer-financier types in that middle space. But those are a very specific kind of script and project, and I certainly don't have any of them on my slate.

Do you see a point in which the smaller types of independent films are going to be more sustainable economically or any ways in which those older models can be retooled for a more crowded, multiplatform marketplace? I don't, which is not to say that they won't be. I certainly hope they will be. But you don't have a set of distributors out there willing to back films with a reasonable amount of money that aren't obviously having this more expansive commercial element. And nor do I see a self-distribution model getting you to that place, unless you're lucky, which people are. This is why I turned to documentaries. I saw an opening, which worked out relatively well, that it could be a little bit more predictable. We did Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, and we did very well with it. Soul Power we're doing well with. But then I did another film which I love called Bomb It, which is the history of the global graffiti movement, and I thought it was a fine, fun, very entertaining, very sellable film. It wasn't going to be distributed by Paramount Pictures, but I thought it had strong prospects on video, TV, and all the rest. But, despite a tremendous effort by the director, Jon Reiss, it's been extremely difficult. We essentially ended up distributing it ourselves. Well, we did, except we sold the DVD rights.

About the process of self-distributing Bomb It: I think that one of the things I've gleaned from the series of articles Reiss wrote for Filmmaker is that it seems so exhausting after you go through the process of making a film to then have to market and distribute it. Without the traditional division of labor between production, marketing and distribution, do you think a lot of people who might normally have gone into filmmaking will find it just too daunting? For instance, if you had to do that with some of your earlier films, do you think you would've made them?  I think it would have been almost impossible. There are two issues about the division of labor: What's your expertise? And two, how you want to spend your time? And then there's a third issue, I guess: Is it sustainable? And I'm not sure. I guess there's probably been some film that people self-distributed in which you could say [that the practice] was sustainable — that [the filmmakers] were actually able to pay for the cost of the film and the cost of distributing it and support themselves [in the process]. But I've never seen that example, to be honest. I mean, the real bottom line for me is I'm all for treating filmmaking as just an adjunct of the arts as opposed to an adjunct of the motion-picture industry. When somebody paints a painting — well, this is actually not quite the right analogy — somebody paints a painting, oftentimes they're not thinking about the art industry. There's a much greater consciousness that these are artists and that they need to be supported in what they're doing. There's a large not-for-profit side. You don't open up Art in America magazine and look for the weekend grosses at the Leo Castelli or Pace Wildenstein galleries. You know what I mean? [laughs] I mean, it's a business as well, but you can be very well-respected and in a way make a living if you're skilled at it without buying into all of these other elements, which are incredibly debilitating. So that's in a way sort of what I advocate, and I think that goes into the DIY as well. It's really turning the paradigm over and not trying to conceive of independent films as a gateway to becoming a Hollywood producer or director, which I think is so distorting. I think it leads people to make really ill-conceived and uninteresting films. If you're going to do it, be an artist, be bold and take your risks, but what corresponds with that is of course you have to do it in a very low-cost way. But, you know, maybe that's just wishful thinking as well. [laughs]