A24’s “The Smashing Machine” is here.
Benny Safdie’s latest, and first solo directorial project, follows Mark Kerr (played, fearlessly, by Dwayne Johnson) a pioneering UFC fighter in its early days, before the sport (and its associated corporations) were worth untold fortunes. In the movie you see him struggle with a dependency on drugs and alcohol and glimpse his relationship to then-girlfriend Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt). It’s a beautiful, intimate portrait of a man driven to win and fighting his demons, and while it might seem, superficially at least, like other sports movies, it is wholly its own.
TheWrap spoke to writer/director Safdie about the origins of the movie, working with Johnson and his next collaboration with Johnson – an adaptation of Daniel Pinkwater’s “Lizard Music.”
Where did this come from? Why Mark Kerr?
Dwayne approached us in 2019 with this project, to do a movie about Mark Kerr, and specifically the documentary [“The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr”]. And I remember watching this thing and just loving it and then also falling in love with Mark as a person and the struggles he was going through. I immediately could sense from Dwayne that like, Oh, there’s a different guy here in front of me than who’s present everywhere else, and that maybe there is a certain level of invincibility that he portrays and puts out there that, and I think in the movie too, like when somebody’s that physically strong, assume they can handle anything. It’s just what your brain does. And I liked the idea that there’s a lot more going on there than you think and it’s almost an extreme example of that.
I thought, Okay, this is something I just was really excited by and then it’s 2019. COVID happens, we’re talking about it, but then things just drift apart. I didn’t know what was going to happen with it. And I remember finding a sweater, this Nautica sweater in triple XL. And I wanted to give it to Dwayne. Because I didn’t know what he was going to do, what was going to happen, when this movie was going to happen, but I wanted him to have something to let him know that our meeting was very important to me in some way. I like, “Whenever you get this, put this on and maybe it’ll help you become Mark.” He never got the sweater. I don’t know what happened. Did I send it to the wrong address? Who knows?
But then I never stopped thinking about it. I’ve got screen grabs of Mark on my phone. And I would watch the documentary, just thinking about Mark and Dwayne becoming this guy, and there was just something I knew that was going to be really important for myself. I don’t know why I related to the character so much but I did. I have addiction in my family and I’ve dealt with that. I’ve seen it in a lot of ways. And there was a certain level of, you put this front on the world and nobody knows what you’ve been through in life. A lot of the times maybe you have to put on a stronger face than you have, because that’s what the moment calls for. All those things just related to me and I really wanted to tell a story where you focus on these small details of his life and through those small details, you understand everything about the person you know.
And yes, there’s a documentary that exists and that’s unbelievable. I thought, What if I was there? Honestly, I really wished I was present to be able to document Mark. And because there’s certain things that I have the ability to do. You could do things multiple times. You can really get at the meaning of what somebody’s saying. You can use music in different ways. You can you can add people to scenes that they weren’t in to really highlight a point. You could change dialog. You can change characters. There’s all these things that you could do. But I did want it to feel like, in a way, virtual reality. I wanted it to feel like you went back to this time period and you were living in it audibly, with the sound design, and then with the textures, and then the way it looked – shooting on 16mm had this evocative feeling to it.
The concept was to just get into this world and live inside of it, and then put you in the person’s brain, so that when you get to these moments of fights, you’re living with all the stuff he has to live with. And what does that feel like? It was just something that I felt I had to do.
When it comes to the time, like, Well, what do you want to do next? It’s like, How about the thing that I hadn’t stopped thinking about for four years? Sometimes you can’t really explain them. But there were parts of Mark. And then as I got to know him, making this movie, I just became really impressed with his ability through his recovery process, to admit fault and talk about things that he did wrong. I thought that was so beautiful – that somebody could have such a new perspective on life. And then I was like, Well, what if you made a movie that’s ostensibly a sports movie, but it’s about somebody coming to terms with themselves and gaining a new point of view on life? That, to me, would be really awesome if you could achieve that.
You were gone for so long. You came back to Dwayne with all these ideas but he could have gone to somebody else, right?
I had no clue. I threw a flyer when I saw Emily. I said, “What’s going on with Dwayne? Is he doing this?” I said, “I want to be involved in any way that I can,” because at that point, I didn’t know if somebody else was working on it. I said, “I just feel like we can do something together.” I really did feel like I understood him, and for no other reason than once I saw what he was interested in, I saw what he wanted to explore. Then as we started talking, it just became clear that, yes, we’ve had different life experiences, but we’ve had similar struggles in a lot of ways. Also talking to Mark, really understanding that there’s certain things that go deep, from your childhood, that just resonate throughout your life. It was almost like we were speaking the same language. I would say, “Look, we’re doing a lot of things, we’re changing things, and they’re subtle things, but we’re changing things. Some are more than others, because I want other people to feel what you went through, because I feel like that’s a positive experience for other people to go through your life, because if they see the world through your eyes, it’ll change them in some small way.” That was just what I thought.
And was Dwayne on board for this?
Dwayne was on board from the beginning because he really wanted to explore new sides of himself. I remember sitting down with him and Emily just being like, “Look, we’re going to talk about things that we’ve experienced and said in arguments with our significant others that we’ve been embarrassed about. Maybe you said something that you really felt bad about, that was too mean.” I wanted to depict a relationship that is complicated and not what you would normally see in a movie, one where both people are at fault, where she’s trying to understand him and he’s putting her down for trying to understand him. “Oh, did you read that in one of your books?” That’s not a nice thing to say. What’s also not a nice thing to say is, “Oh, it’s really nice, but you’re making me say ‘no’ all the time.” Those are little things that eat at the other person.
We talked about all these little things to get at a deeper understanding. Because if you see that on screen and you think, Oh, my God, I’ve done that before, but that means somebody else has done that before, and maybe it’s okay that I’ve done that. It’s a weird little thing, when you see yourself reflected back. It’s almost just like, Okay, maybe I don’t have to be so hard on myself. And I could come to a different place. There were scenes that I knew they were going to get intense, specifically the big argument scene.
That was interesting, because, I thought, Well, how do I attack this scene from a filmmaking point of view? I’d been working on all these fight scenes for so long, where you break them up in sections, you do them in these bite-size physical exertions. And when you’re done with one, you move on to the next one. Everything that happens is left in the wake. And you could add a bloody eye at the end of section three that stays on through the next sections. It keeps continuity as you move through.
I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if I treated the fight like that? The actual scene was eight-and-a-half minutes and I broke it up into sections – first section, second section, third section. She comes in and out of the room and he leaves the room. What happens when he leaves the room? And it allows you to focus on certain things for longer, when you really need to dial in the intricacies, and then, at the end, when he’s on the ground holding somebody for their dear life, that’s intense and unfortunately, I’ve felt that before. It’s a difficult thing to go through and seeing them do it was such an emotional reality. I remember having a stunt coordinator on “The Curse,” he said about the guy falling onto a branch. He’s like, “If you have it after this one, that hurts, so let’s not do it again.” And I was like, “Noted.” When I saw [what they were doing in that fight scene at the house], I’m like, “We got it. They don’t need to go there again. I certainly don’t want to. We have it.” And I knew we had it.
Did it surprise you how down Dwayne was?
It didn’t surprise me. It’s such an internal performance that I was in awe every day watching him do this and what we were able to talk about together. Like in the elevator, like, “Oh, you’re on my back. You’re not going to show my face.” I said, “No, we’re only going to stay on your back.” And he’s like, “Okay.” And then he starts acting with his back, and he starts doing these really subtle things. I would talk to him about how good it would feel too because I said, “I know it’s hard to show emotion in front of other people.” I know that he doesn’t like doing that, because nobody does really. I said, “But the thing is, when you do it, it does feel really good because it’s a an emotional release.” And I said, “When I cry, it’s not because I’m thinking of anything sad, it’s because I get confused emotionally,” and then he hears that, and then you see him in the elevator, and you look at his eyes, and they’re just moving, because you could see him trying to pick what he needs to focus on just to get through the elevator ride and not burst into tears in front of all these people. You see his brain making these things. That’s how he interpreted that. That’s an unbelievable thing and it’s so small.
For me, when I’m acting in stuff, you do things that you hope translate. You hope people see them. And I really wanted to highlight those things and those moments, because I find it very profound to see somebody feel real emotions on screen. That’s a hard thing to do, because it’s when somebody’s really feeling something, not performatively, that’s intense. It’s cool, in a way, to feel those feelings, and it’s like “It’s a Wonderful Life” when the end and he’s feeling such an extreme feeling of joy, I cry every time because I’m feeling his joy, and in that movie, what changes in his life? Nothing, nothing in his life changes. His perspective changes. And I thought, Okay, let me try that.
He has to convey all of those emotions from under all of that makeup too, which could have been a real hinderance.
For sure. And that was something working with Kazu [Hiro, makeup designer] was very important, because we had various versions, from nothing to a middle ground to an extreme overhaul. But I thought it was very important that he come through, because I knew he was showing a side of himself with this performance, too. I didn’t want him to be hidden. I wanted it to be a conversation with Mark. And that meant that he had to be present as well. That was what we were dialing in, too, into the character. And then, in a weird way, it’s like, Oh yeah, I’m a part of this too, emotionally. I remember sending Kazu my eyebrows – just the shape of my eyebrows. Or he’s like, “I love your eyebrows.” It’s interesting how that happens.
You and Dwayne are teaming up for “Lizard Music.” What’s the vibe there?
There’s a certain thing that happens, if you’ve connected with the movie, you get into a certain zone emotionally. It puts you in a place where you’re thinking about things and I wanted you to feel filled up and happy to have experienced something. And then I thought, I don’t really get to show my kids a lot of my movies. What if I made a movie where it was just as important to me as it was to them? And this book in particular is really special in that it speaks to kids in a way that’s very unique. And I thought, Well, if I could make an adventure, exploring emotions and things, that would just be really awesome.
The vibe of it is going to be … we’ll find it when it happens. But I’m very excited about the idea of exploring a new area of people to talk to and starting a conversation in a new place, because that’s what I did here, with “The Smashing Machine.” I was like, Okay, what is this? How do I access this world?
I just remember reading the “Lizard Music” book to my kids and seeing their eyes open up and their world open up, and it was exciting to me. I love the author, I speak to him all the time. He’s a really unique person. I’ve read so many of his books. I don’t know, there’s something that I think is really exciting and magical and wild and fun about it.
Have you thought about your approach? Puppets? Computer-generated creatures?
Thought about my approach, but well I don’t want to go deep, deep into it, but it’s definitely like there is an approach. The book is about encountering a civilization of sentient, human-sized lizards. Yeah, that’s what it’s about. And so that’s what’s going to happen. Each time I try to learn a new thing, or take something that I did on this and put it into that, because I feel like you learn how to better communicate in certain ways.
“The Smashing Machine” is out now.
