Benny Safdie brings ‘Smashing Machine’ to life with Dwayne Johnson

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There’s a scene in The Smashing Machine in which Dwayne Johnson told writer-director Benny Safdie he needed to get punched in the face.

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Opening in theatres Oct. 3, the movie casts Johnson as pioneering MMA fighter Mark Kerr as he rose in the sport while battling his own demons with drug and alcohol abuse.

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“There’s a brutal fight in the film where Dwayne said to me, ‘I have to get punched in the face,’” filmmaker Benny Safdie told Postmedia in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival. “And when it came time to shoot the scene, I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to remind him,’ but he said it again.”

To play Kerr, Johnson wanted to craft his most realistic performance yet. So in addition to getting whacked for real, he packed on more muscle than he ever had before to completely transform his body.

“I asked him to get bigger for the role, so he put on 30, 40 pounds of muscle,” Safdie said. Oscar-winning artist Kazu Hiro went a step further, transforming Johnson by having him sit in the makeup chair for nearly four hours.

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Smashing Machine wasn’t just a leap of faith for Johnson. Safdie, who made a name for himself co-directing Good Time and Uncut Gems with his brother, Josh, was also taking a risk.

Good Time, a 2017 crime drama that starred Robert Pattinson and Benny, was cited by director Matt Reeves as the reason he cast the Twilight star as Batman.

When it was released in 2019, Uncut Gems earned Adam Sandler some of the best critical notices of his career, including a nod for best actor at the 2020 Independent Spirit Awards.

Johnson, who has cemented himself as one of Hollywood’s most bankable action stars, is not known for his dramatic roles. But he saw what the siblings had been able to unlock with other actors and approached the Safdies with John Hyams’ 2002 documentary on Kerr, The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr.

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Could Johnson, a proven box office force who makes four-quadrant movies, handle that kind of demanding role? Safdie wanted to find out.

“Here, you have this strong man, who is dealing with so much struggle on the inside. I thought it was amazing that Dwayne wanted to tell that story,” Safdie said, recalling their 2019 meeting.

The pandemic delayed the project, and even threatened to sideline it permanently as Johnson kept churning out blockbusters.

But Safdie had a nagging “what if?” that he couldn’t shake.

“I’ve always wanted to make a movie about fighting. Some of my favourite movies are fight movies —Raging Bull, Rocky, Rocky III, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Harder They Fall, Fat City, even (Charlie Chaplin’s)City Lights has boxing in it. It’s such a unique thing because it’s cinematic and I think you can learn a lot about your life,” he said.

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With the film still sitting on the shelf, Safdie sent Johnson a handwritten letter and received no response. He revived the idea of telling Kerr’s story as he was shooting Oppenheimer with Emily Blunt, who bonded with Johnson while they were making 2021’s Jungle Cruise.

“They’re rooting for each other. There’s a real friendship there,” Safdie said.

Despite being an early pioneer with UFC, Kerr never achieved the household-name status of the sport’s modern-day stars. He battled addiction and struggled to balance his relationship with his girlfriend (played by Blunt) and the rigours of the ring.

Blunt was intrigued to see Johnson tackle a more emotionally complex role.

“We became very fast friends. We had an immediate secret language,” Blunt said at TIFF as she recounted their first meeting. “I just remember us shooting in Hawaii, and it was our first week working together. We sat under this umbrella and we just talked and shared our souls and I was just really taken by how different he was from what I had imagined. I said to him very early on, ‘The Rock is the performance of a lifetime.’”

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Blunt encouraged Johnson to embrace “the leap into the unknown.”

“I tried to reassure (him) it’s good to be scared,” she said. “I think like Benny, I felt there was a very deep well of experience, from his childhood to how he looks at the world and how he walks through life. It’s very unique and very full and I felt that because he’s so curious about the world he had an ability to tap into all of that and maybe have a place to put it in a role like this.”

Safdie, who won a Silver Lion for directing at the Venice Film Festival, hopes audiences appreciate seeing a different side of Johnson.

“Here’s this guy who appears to be invincible, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have struggles and emotions. I showed Dwayne a clip from It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s when George Bailey realizes he’s not going to be able to live out his dreams … In one shot, the camera pans and he goes from devastation to kind of smiling and pretending that everything is OK. That’s Mark Kerr. I know Dwayne knows what that feels like to have to take his emotions and push them down for somebody else,” he recalled. “It was an unspoken thing … and as we got into the process of it, it was like, ‘Let’s just jump in together.’”

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Johnson is already earning raves for his performance and there’s talk of an Oscar nod. But no matter how moviegoers respond to the film, he’s happy he took the risk.

“I’ve been lucky to have the career that I have been able to have over the years, but I wanted something like this for such a long time,” Johnson said at TIFF. “You know how we all have that little voice behind the ribcage that tells us there’s more and what-if and go for it … I had been waiting for some time for this opportunity. When you listen to your gut … I believe the universe will meet you halfway and believe in you and say, ‘You can do it.’ For me, that, ‘Hey, you can do it,’ was Benny Safdie.”

The Smashing Machine opens in theatres Oct. 3.

mdaniell@postmedia.com

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