Ken Burns discusses his Muhammad Ali documentary - "The Takeout"

For legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, profiling Muhammad Ali, perhaps the greatest athlete of all-time, provided unique challenges and took seven years to complete. Among the most difficult was how Burns, his daughter Sarah, and son-in-law David McMahon could produce an all-encompassing documentary about not just Ali's boxing career, but also his political activism, religious journey, and personal life.  Burns on the challenges of filmmaking: "Every film has a million problems... if you see them pejoratively, you're lost. But if you see them as something, friction to overcome, they just become irritations like in an oyster that eventually become a pearl. And you hope and we trust that that when the films are done, they're pearls."  On Ali's stance during the civil rights movement and how he tried to capture that in his series: "Each and every one of us is an individual person. So the civil rights movement has as many sort of views as there are people involved in it or even people reacting to it in some way. And so we, in this story, it touches on many of those dynamics. And it's not it's not something that's fixed. It's fluid. It's like his faith is fluid, and he grows more and more expansive."  On Ali's bravado as a boxer and entertainer: "Nobody was as good at promoting as he was. And he knew just the right word to say how to get under his opponent's skin, how to frame every single fight as a kind of drama with him as the lead... the fights were like the collected works of William Shakespeare. He made himself the lead character. He made himself Hamlet or Macbeth, or whatever, you know, King Lear in whatever of the fights he did. And he did it with a genius that we just still shake our heads that nobody can do that today. Nobody understands that."  On Ali's legacy: "He intersects with all of the issues of the last half of the 20th century. It's the role of sports in society, it's the role of black athletes in sports, it's the nature of black masculinity and manhood. It's about the civil rights movement, not as a monolithic one thing, but as many different tugs and pulls of various factions and interests. It's about politics, it's about war, it's about sex, it's about faith, it's about religion, it's about Islam, it's about all these things and all these things that we're dealing with today." 

"This is a seven-year labor of love and what we wanted to do," Burns said about his upcoming four-part PBS documentary series "Muhamad Ali," which premieres September 19. "We wanted to do soup-to-nuts from his birth and boyhood in Jim Crow segregated Louisville, Kentucky, to his death only five years ago from Parkinson's Disease."  

Burns spoke with CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett for this week's episode of "The Takeout" podcast.